Kathy Acker (1947-1997) gained cult status as a punk feminist icon over the course of her career. An experimental novelist, poet, and art critic, Acker is best known for her use of appropriation, pastiche, and other techniques that allowed her to blend fact and fiction, biography and dream images, hardcore sex and caustic political satire into an innovative, non-narrative Cyber-Punk style. Novels include Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Don Quixote: Which was a Dream (1986), and Empire of the Senseless (1988), among many others. A collection of her essays Bodies of Work was published in 1996. Acker died of cancer in Tijuana in 1997.