Sam D'Allesandro, born Richard Anderson in 1956, studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He was handsome and charismatic, the man who'd turn your head at a hundred yards.

He began as a poet and published a book of elegant lyrics called Slippery Sins. Soon he fell in with the so-called "New Narrative" writers Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others, and his writing took a sharp turn toward an extreme purity and poise. He reached out to other like minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy, with whom he began an epistolary collaboration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro.

At the peak of his powers, he began to feel ill. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a brilliant body of work that ranges from stories of one paragraph only to fully developed novellas.

Read about
The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro.

Read the story "Electrical Type of Thing"
featured in Suspect Thoughts Journal.

Read "The Zombie Pit" at Velvet Mafia.

Listen to a podcast on The Writers Block at KQED:
Kevin Killian reads "Nothing Ever Just Disappears."

Read "Bringing Back Sam"
an interview with Kevin Killian at the Bay Area Reporter.

Read Kevin Killian's Introduction to
The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro.