Wayne Koestenbaum

Poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of several collections of poetry, including Ultramarine (Nightboat, 2022), Camp Marmalade (2018), The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (2012), Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (2006), The Milk of Inquiry (1999), and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems (1990), which was named one of the Village Voice Literary Supplement’s Favorite Books of the Year.

His prose works include Humiliation (2011); Hotel Theory (2007); the novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (2004); Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics (2000); and National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993).

Koestenbaum earned a BA at Harvard University, an MA at Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD at Princeton University. Koestenbaum’s work often explores the male body and the emotional, sexual, and social weight of its exposure. In an interview for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Koestenbaum described his writing process as a kind of bodily endeavor: “I extrude my vulnerable inner lining. I purge. And then I examine the contents—my expulsed interior—and begin the bloody interrogation."
   
Koestenbaum’s honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at Yale University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and lives in New York City.