Laurie Weeks is a writer, performer, artist and teacher. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Zipper Mouth, was published by The Feminist Press in 2011 and was honored with the International Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Debut Novel, and was among five shortlisted for Triangle Publishing’s Edmund White Award for Best Debut Novel. Zipper Mouth appeared on numerous “Most Notable” and “Top 10” book lists for 2011 and 2012, and a German edition is forthcoming. A Turkish translation appeared in 2015. A portion of this novel appeared in 2008 in Dave Eggers' yearly anthology, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Weeks is among the names shouted-out in Le Tigre’s hit single, Hot Topic, and in 1999 she toured the country with Sister Spit, an assemblage of post-punk performers led by Michelle Tea. Weeks was a contributing screenwriter on the film Boys Don’t Cry. Her fiction, essays, interviews and collaborations with visual artists have appeared in the US and Europe in, to name a few: Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom; Vice; Whitney Biennial 2012; Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors; The Baffler; Index; Movement Research Performance Journal; LA Weekly; Fetish: An Anthology of Fetish Fiction; FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication; Art on Paper; Nobodaddies; and numerous blogs. Weeks’ story Debbie’s Barium Swallow is featured in Semiotext(e)’s award-winning bestseller The New Fuck You: An Anthology of Lesbian Writing, a lineup of work that includes Sapphire and Dodie Bellamy. Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz in 1996, TNFU is now in its fourth printing. Another popular piece, Nacho From The Edge, is printed in Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat, edited by Amy Scholder for Firebrand Books. Weeks has read and performed widely in downtown NYC venues including P.S. 122, The Kitchen, Pyramid Club, LaMama and Jackie 60. In 2006 Weeks directed the original incarnation of Hell, an opera by Eileen Myles and composer Michael Webster, staged in Tijuana, Mexico, L.A. (The Red Cap) and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She also wrote, directed, and performed in Young Skulls II, a short play loosely based on a true-crime murder by teenage lesbian thrill-killers, which was staged at the WOW Café in NY and in San Francisco at The Lab. The piece originated from Summer of Bad Plays, a long-running series produced irregularly in downtown nightclubs and lofts, co-founded by Weeks in collaboration with a loose collective that includes legendary filmmaker Charles Atlas and performance artists Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton of “DanceNoise,” Tom Murrin, aka “The Alien Comic,” Hapi Phace, Mike Iveson and David Ilku, to name but a few. In addition to live performance, Weeks has appeared in several videos by Cecilia Dougherty; most notably she played the role of Lance Loud in Dougherty’s feature-length video Gone, a reinterpretation of the 70s PBS reality show An American Family. She was also the subject of a 1998 video portrait by Dougherty. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts literary grant, and was awarded a 7-month fellowship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown, MA. She has also attended residencies at The Edward Albee Foundation on Montauk, Long Island, and the Millay Colony. She received her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she studied under cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig. Her focus was literature, social engineering, and the use of language as an instrument of violence against bodies and the imagination. She has been a panelist and presenter at numerous academic conferences—among them Columbia, Brown, Brandeis and Kent State Universities as well as the University of California at San Diego.