Virgil Kills

“Artist, academic, and poet Wilson explores an artist’s identity and desire in this revelatory collection… Throughout, Wilson offers keen insights on tensions between corporeality and subjectivity, between the individual and socially constructed identity, and between dreams and reality. This adds up to a nuanced portrait of an artist mining his own life for material.“—Publishers Weekly

“As the stories progress, readers get an intimate view of Virgil’s life and his impressions of sexual and governmental politics, race, identity, and how reality is perceived through the lens of societal constructs and expectations. Virgil’s episodic adventures flow with uninhibited prose and a keen sense of self.“—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter

“Moving from slumber to play to performance to life, Ronaldo V. Wilson blurs the realities that face this Black Filipino gay man, using them to establish a mirror. Mirrored in Virgil’s life are the experiences known all too well to those artists and dreamers who are queer and Black.“—Greg Oletsa, ANMLY

“In Virgil Kills, Ronaldo Wilson leads us through a landscape of myths and dreams, desire and absurdity, with queer Black life always at its fierce center. This book shimmers with wit and brilliance.“—Danzy Senna

“Ronaldo Wilson’s kaleidoscopic and genre-defiant book of linked stories is an endless dream to behold. Like Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Wilson’s Virgil has an attitude and wit that sting like a thousand and one scorpions. He is a world-class traveler, a floater, a circumstance-and-perspective fluid artist and intellectual who doesn’t just break stereotypes—he slays them, so as ‘to move forward, to offend in the face of casual and daily assault.’ Mixing storytelling and criticism, he reminds us the myth of safe spaces and the history of, and ongoing, violations and violence on black and brown bodies, and that ‘no one else’s story matters as he is making his.’ Edgy, brazen, and poetically-packed, Virgil Kills revamps our outlook on race, sex, and class, and offers us new and interesting ways of reading and writing fiction.“—R. Zamora Linmark

“A novel, a dream book, a study in self-formation, a concert of surface, sex, and underswell… Ronaldo Wilson’s ingenious Virgil Kills guides us, in the style of collage and choreography, through a netherworld where the ‘the act of the body in the turns of its written emissions’ can connect memory to the real and the fictive. Wilson’s portrait of Virgil—mixed-media invention; composite persona—is in equal parts riotous and intimate. In scenes of sexual acts, social kinship, family attachments, and racial marking; in narratives of loss, defiance, escape, and exile, Wilson refutes ‘sorrow as the route to freedom,’ defining what it means instead to render ‘temperature and thought’—that is, to amaze, abrogate, and amplify the attributes of embodied life.“—Roberto Tejada

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); and two forthcoming books Carmelina, Figures: An Artist’s Book (Wendy’s Subway, 2021), and a book of stories, Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. The recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo, and is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).