Robert Peters Bio gaee

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Robert Peters

Robert Peters, a leading American poet and fiction writer, playwright, editor, and actor, was recently designated by the editors of "The James White Review" as, after Ginsberg's death, the "outest" of all major American poets. Among his fifty published titles are the three books featured here, published by GLB Publishers: Good Night, Paul (poetry to a lover), Snapshots For A Serial Killer (fiction), and Zapped: Two Novellas (Comix fiction). Other works with strong gay motifs are Ludwig of Bavaria, The Blood Countess, Love Poems For Robert Mitchum, and the XXX-rated Secret Sex Life of J. Edgar Hoover. He has also published several volumes of memoirs with the Univ. Of Wisconsin Press; he is now working on his memoirs of the 1960s covering the difficult years of his coming out and leaving his wife and three children to follow his long-suppressed gay drives.
He was born on a farm in northern Wisconsin, spent three years in the Army in Europe during World War II, and acquired three academic degrees at the University of Wisconsin, earning his PhD in Victorian Literature in 1952. His academic publications include a 3-volume edition of the letters of John Addington Symonds, the gay Victorian historian and poet, and a prize-winning study of the work of Charles Algemon Swinburne. His work appears frequently in a number of leading gay and straight literary periodicals. He has held Professorships of Literature in several Universities and retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of California at Irvine in 1994.
He lives with his lover/companion of over two decades, lexicologist, archivist, poet, and fiction writer Paul Trachtenberg. Paul recently published Alphabet Soup: A Laconic Lexicon For Word Lovers, lists of about 20,000 words with definitions arranged alphabetically by category for easy memorization - a two-year project. Both Peters and Trachtenberg are serious Scrabble® players, frequently attending clubs and tournaments.
Robert Peters may be contacted directly regarding availability of any of his publications (including some OP titles) at ptrachrp@aol.com or by writing to P.O. Box 5803, Huntington Beach, CA 92646.

Here are what some of his contemporaries say about Robert Peters:

And this from the Orange County Weekly:

In the pantheon of Orange County literature, Robert Peters
would be one of the Titans, a powerful writer whose
work predates and often eclipses the bright young things
garnering the crowd's attention. Deft and versatile. Peters
has had more incarnations than can be easily imagined
He has written such shocking one-man shows as
Mengele's Uterus: The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover,
fairy tales that are brilliantly crafted but so disturbing as
to often drive people from the room. He's been an uncom-
promising critic of the self-indulgence that runs through
out the art form. At other times, the Peters you get is a
plainspoken poet sketching out life's nuances in pencil
sketches. That's the style that characte rizes his forthcoming
work, FAMILIAL LOVE AND OTHER MISFORTUNES.
This is Peters at his best and, perhaps ironically, his least dramatic.
In a crisp, prosaic style. Peters cuts into his farmyard youth.
There is much beauty here. In one poem he writes, "near
shore, beneath/glare ice, cerise berries glimmered." A
rumination on pigs stands easily with small, biographical
portraits of his neighbors, poor Greek girls living off charity
a Polish woman giving colored eggs on Easter. This is
work by a seminal OC writer, and is certainly worthy of attention.
Robert Peters reads ...

___Victor Infante, Orange County Weekly, June, 2000