Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Writing, performance, theater
Website: maxecrandall.com
Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director whose work moves between the page and the stage. He earned a PhD in English and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan and, by his own account, never studied poetry or performance formally — his early development as a writer came through workshops with the poet CAConrad during a stretch of years in Philadelphia, and through mentors including Kevin Killian, Claudia La Rocco, Mónica de la Torre, and Stacy Szymaszek.
Crandall spent seven years as Associate Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University and is a poetry editor at FENCE. In 2024 he produced and curated the San Francisco Poets Theater Festival for Small Press Traffic’s 50th anniversary, and that September he became the organization’s Director. He lives and works in Oakland, and in 2026 held an artist residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, developing two new plays and a book about art and fantasy.
His book The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem, 2020), a genre-blurring “performance novel” about AIDS archives and intergenerational queer memory, was named to the New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020 and LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. He has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Poetry Project, Poets House, the Lambda Literary Foundation, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and a Eureka Commission from Onassis USA.
Crandall’s practice combines archival and interdisciplinary research with experimental, collaborative process to make performance writing invested in genre, ritual, and collective live experience. He works across poets theater, dance, and print, often devising pieces with choreographers, puppeteers, and ensembles of performers rather than working alone, and he founded the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture to produce a recurring poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. His work is animated by trans and queer life, camp aesthetics, and counternarrative approaches to cultural memory — reworking historical and pop-cultural material (a Reagan-era AIDS archive, a Merce Cunningham commission, Euripides’ Bacchae, a soap opera) into ritualized, boundary-blurring theatrical events. He situates his work within Bay Area experimental writing lineages, particularly New Narrative and poets theater, and has published criticism on art and performance in Women and Performance, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Critical Correspondence, Jacket2, and Transgender Studies Quarterly.
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