Adam Klein (writer)

Early years

Klein was born in 1962 in Coral Gables, Florida. He left high school in Miami with a GED and attended Miami Dade Community College, where he studied fashion and poetry. He spent one year as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, studying poetry with Marvin Bell. He then left school to live briefly in Chicago and Boston. With friends from work in Boston, he started the first incarnation of the band The Size Queens. Eventually, he moved to San Francisco, where he spent many years in the 1980s as a performer in the local club scene.

Literary career

Klein graduated from San Francisco State University, where he studied with Bob Glück and Molly Giles, with an MA in creative writing. He later earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School, where he worked with Robert Polito, Lynne Tillman, Honor Moore, Sigrid Nunez, and Patrick McGrath. His first book, The Medicine Burns, is a collection of short stories that was nominated for a Lambda Book Award. Selections from the collection appear in Best American Gay Fiction, edited by Brian Bouldrey, and Men on Men 5, edited by David Bergman. With poet Thomas Avena, Klein cowrote the artist monograph Jerome: After the Pageant about mixed-media artist Jerome Caja. Klein is also the author of the novel Tiny Ladies. An excerpt of Tiny Ladies appears in the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person, edited by Michelle Tea and Clint Catalyst. The Medicine Burns and Tiny Ladies are now part of Dzanc Books' rEprint series.

Klein was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bangladesh and then a Fulbright lecturer in India. He later worked at the American University of Beirut. He currently serves as an assistant professor of English at the American University of Afghanistan. Several publications have featured essays by Klein on his experiences and thoughts about his time in South Asia and the Middle East.

He edited the short-story anthology The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan, which was published by Dzanc Books in November 2013. The collection features work from students of Klein's open creative writing workshops in Kabul, and according to the publisher, it "gives voice to a generation clamoring to be heard under the simplifying headlines and collectivized identity that thirty years of war have brought upon the country."

Musical and multimedia career

Klein is also a singer-songwriter who has been a part of several musical projects. In 1999, Klein began making music with cowriter Michael Mullen and started the band Glasstown, which recorded two CDs. The two collaborated to form the band Roman Evening, which also recorded two CDs. Roman Evening's second CD was a soundtrack to accompany Klein's novel Tiny Ladies.

In 2003, Klein and Mullen began a close collaboration with Tim Mooney, former producer and drummer with American Music Club. Mooney was a member of Klein's current project, The Size Queens, for its first four CDs, producing, drumming, and playing bass and guitar on various tracks. He died suddenly in 2013. The Size Queens began to work with Wally Sound and continues to work with players associated with Mooney's studio, Closer. With The Size Queens, Klein has collaborated with many visual artists, writers, and musicians to produce seven CDs and many multimedia projects.

From its inception at the start of the Iraq War, The Size Queens has been engaged in political issues, particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; this latter focus reflects Klein's experience and literary output. More recent work has focused on the military and prison industrial complexes as well as matters of economic disparity and the environment. This includes the 2013 CD Save the Plant! Two video premieres followed in 2014: "Spinning World," which appeared along with the short story "Carefree," in Pank Magazine and "Fifty Shades of Pale," which appeared with an extensive profile of the band by Chin-Sun Lee, on The Believer blog. The latter video was filmed by Chuck Mobley in Rancho Mirage, California, and stars Mx. Justin Vivian Bond.

The band sees itself as a "project" with an interest in exploring media distribution in a variety of media platforms and applications. This focus can be seen in the 2012 video album Tammy, Cybertariat, At the Aral Sea, for which The Size Queens partnered with artists Fred Tomaselli, Scott Blake, and Michael Rackowitz and performer and author Mx. Justin Vivian Bond for a faux Kickstarter campaign. In 2011, the band released the case file and CD Appetite for Redaction. In 2010, the band released the CD The Size Queens III in collaboration with SF Camerawork’s exhibition An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself. The CD was released as part of a 65-page exhibition catalog and includes an introduction by Mary Gaitskill and guest performers Laura Albert and Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Painter Amy Sillman selected the group's Patrick Hillman directed video "Reading Rosalind Krauss" as one of her top ten picks in Artforum in December 2009. In addition, Tony Cokes, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, created his own sing-along video from the song for his Retro (Pop, Terror, Critique) exhibition.

Other Size Queens collaborators have included Nicole Brodsky, former American Music Club bassist Danny Pearson, guitarist Mike Carnahan, and singer-songwriters Carlos Forster, John Murry, and Hannah Marcus. Klein also has collaborated on media projects and literary works with artist Marco Breuer; writer Chin-Sun Lee; photographer Jeanne Friscia; and extensively with Chuck Mobley, former director of SF Camerawork, a nonprofit visual arts space in San Francisco.

With Glasstown

With Roman Evening

With The Size Queens

Awards