Kevin Killian (December 24, 1952 – June 15, 2019)[1] was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright, primarily of LGBT literature.

[4] Killian was also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco, as well as the New Narrative movement in San Francisco, which included figures like Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and more.

[14] Author Dodie Bellamy featured him as a partially fictional character in her vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker.

[16] Killian once based a volume of poetry on the work of horror film director Dario Argento[17] (motivated to do so as a response to the AIDS epidemic).

[18] Noted author Edmund White described his work as "a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to … West Coast writers … a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists.

"[19] The Village Voice called My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, "impeccably edited".

[21] The first story in the collection, "Young Hank Williams", was written with Canadian cult writer Derek McCormack.