MAXE Crandall
Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection made the NYPL’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart and Together Men Make Paradigms, and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture. His work has been recognized with fellowships from MacDowell, The Poetry Project, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Poets House, SFMOMA Open Space, and a Eureka Commission from Onassis USA. Maxe is Associate Director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.
"What is there to say that you haven't not said already? Maxe Crandall fills the Reagans' famous silence on AIDS with a dazzling fantasia on glamour, grief, testimony, fandom, and ferocious indignation. Crandall refracts the crimes of the eighties through the icons and cultural debris of that era—so many coldblooded ways for flesh, power, and image to meet in mass death. Global catastrophes ornament Nancy's reign of just saying no as the CIA runs crack to fund the Contras. She floats above, a ghoulish death's head, dead and life-like, the pole star of this performance novel. Nancy introduces hallucination at the viral spike. Above all, The Nancy Reagan Collection explores the meaning of the image in all dimensions, blunt and cryptic, the live self blinks behind the one represented. Like Nancy, you will smile one of your political grins."
— Robert Glück
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— Robert Glück
"Maxe Crandall's The Nancy Reagan Collection is a virtuosic experiment where the all too harrowing reality of the Reagan era and its discontents (AIDS, Iran-Contra, the beginning of the end of the progressive American dream) meets a phantasmagorical interlocution with its strangest protagonist—Nancy Reagan. Crandall hauntingly weaves poetry and historiography together alongside an index of our fallen ancestors to remind us of the bizarre ways that queer and trans people's lives are enmeshed in deadly intimacy with people whose politics and politesse kill us. I love this book."
—Miguel Gutierrez
