Books by Raymond Luczak

Ghosts are everywhere.The Deaf community today doesn't seem to be what it used to be, so a small group of people must decide whether to sell the last Deaf club in America. As its board of trustees reflects on what it means to be Deaf, a few ghosts return to share stories of what it was like when Deaf clubs truly mattered: Mabel Hubbard Bell, the wife of the Deaf community's nemesis Alexander Graham Bell; Nellie Zabel Willhite, the first Deaf woman to earn a pilot's license; Olof Hanson, the first Deaf architect in America; and George Veditz, a charismatic activist who defended the Deaf community's right to sign. Raymond Luczak offers a compelling look into the Deaf community then and now.Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of over 20 books, including The Kinda Fella I Am and A Babble of Objects. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak recounts his unrequited love for a gardener while examining how Walt Whitman (1819-1892) lived as a gay man 150 years before. Inspired by the earthy passions abundant in Whitman's work and the vast social changes between his era and ours, the story becomes an urgent love letter in more ways than one. "The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips is an unabashed celebration of one man's relationship to Walt Whitman: poet, publisher, lover, impromptu nurse, artistic creation, organism, man in full. Like Whitman himself, Raymond Luczak arrives at an unified vision of love in all of its poetic manifestations: sensual, sexual, and textual, a source of electric vistas and voluptuous possibilities of spiritual renewal. He provides precisely the kind of tender reassurance we cannot find words for some nights, but which we so desperately need." -Eric Thomas Norris, co-author of Nocturnal Omissions "In The Kiss of Walt Whitman Still on My Lips, Raymond Luczak has awoken entwined in the arms of the American bard. And here is the bed chat and letters from one poet to another, a communion of fleshly living. Luczak has created a work in the tradition of Ginsberg's Odyssean dreaming of the lost America of love-a vibrant examination of what Whitman called a 'richest fluency' of historical gaiety and modern loving, and a clear transmission of honest affection across the ages." -Dan Vera, author of Speaking Wiri Wiri

In 2002, Raymond Luczak handed us his call to arms for deaf artists everywhere. Ten years later, he revisits the book that challenged assumptions about being an artist. Has anything changed? Yes and no. Luczak's meditations on what makes art "art" and deafness "deaf" asks artists everywhere to rethink their work and live differently. This tenth anniversary edition incorporates new observations made over the past decade. "Written in the form of quick bursts of opinion arrived at over his many years as a poet, playwright, and filmmaker, Luczak seeks to shake deaf artists out of the cages built by the hearing world . . . There are plenty of opinions to argue with in this volume. Yet Luczak calls us to ask important questions of ourselves." - Emily Drabinski, Out

This collection presents four signing-driven plays depicting Deaf characters in situations that illuminate their community in fascinating detail.