Theory for Moving Houses

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory(2010),The Ravickians(2011),Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge(2013) and Houses of Ravicka(2017)—as well as three collections of drawings:Prose Architectures(2017),One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences(2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared POETRY Magazine,The Paris Review,Gulf Coast,Granta,Harper's,BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes.—Eileen MylesGladman’s talent for linguistic architecture makes for a supple, tight promenade through heady ideas whose appeal rests on the implicit connection it draws between a people, their language, and the shape of communication.—Publishers WeeklyThis attention to the movement and moment of the line distinguishes her work from those other experiments with drawn poems, such as Robert Grenier’s drawing poems or Cy Twombly’s calligraphic paintings, that we might reach to for comparison....It’s as if she’s discovered the place where the living line and the line of language converge after a temporary separation.—Mary Wilson, Jacket2