Theatre alum Karen Malpede '71 recently released her new memoir, Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths, with Vine Leaves Press. The book traces Malpede's journey after her violent father dies from cancer, after which Malpede leaves home, determined to become an artist.
The memoir then details Malpede's move to New York, her engagement with the ecofeminist pacifist left, and the story of how she found her partner, George Bartenieff, with whom she spent years creating cutting-edge theater even as they battled cancer again.
Faith Williams at The Chicago Book Review writes, "Malpede’s writing style is extraordinary for its emotional intelligence and its formal daring. She moves between the confessional and the collective, merging memoir with cultural history. In the same breath that she recounts personal violation, she illuminates the radical theater scene of 1960s and '70s New York… She makes language itself an act of rebellion."
Malpede has penned twenty-two plays. With Bartenieff, she co-founded Theater Three Collaborative in 1995. Her short plays, fiction, and essays on ecofeminism, the climate crisis, a new green Federal Theater, bearing witness, the Iraq war, and the U.S. torture program have been published in The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Dark Matter, New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught theater and literature at Smith College, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and John Jay College-CUNY. She has received McKnight National Playwrights’ and Vogelstein fellowships.
