Basil King

Born in England before World War II, Basil King is a painter and a poet who has lived in Brooklyn since 1969. He attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina as a teenager and has been painting for the last six decades. He began to write in the 1980s and is now actively practicing both arts. His books include Identity (2000), Warp Spasm (2001), Mirage: A Poem in 22 Sections (2003), 77 Beasts/Basil King’s Beastiary (2007), Learning to Draw/A History (2011), and, most recently, The Spoken Word/The Painted Hand (2014). In 2010 he exhibited his visual art at Poets House in New York. He is also the subject and narrator of a 2012 film, Basil King: Mirage, by the artists Nicole Peyrafitte and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. In November 2014 he narrated Black Mountain Songs, including a few of his poems, as part the BAM Next Wave Festival.