Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it s like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity. As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.
Raymond Luczak (pronounced as written but with a silent "c") is the author and editor of ten books, including ASSEMBLY REQUIRED: NOTES FROM A DEAF GAY LIFE (RID Press) and MEN WITH THEIR HANDS: A NOVEL (Rebel Satori Press). His work as a poet have appeared in ST. MICHAEL'S FALL (Deaf Life Press) and THIS WAY TO THE ACORNS (Tactile Mind Press). Four of his full-length stage plays have been collected in WHISPERS OF A SAVAGE SORT AND OTHER PLAYS ABOUT THE DEAF AMERICAN EXPERIENCE (Gallaudet University Press). He edited the anthologies EYES OF DESIRE: A DEAF GAY & LESBIAN READER (Alyson) and EYES OF DESIRE 2: A DEAF GLBT READER (Handtype Press). A Midsummer Night's Press will publish his third collection of poems, MUTE, in the spring of 2010.
Luczak was raised in Ironwood, a small mining town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Number seven in a family of nine children, he lost much of his hearing due to double pneumonia at the age of seven months. After high school graduation, Luczak went on to Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC, where he earned a B.A. in English. He learned American Sign Language (ASL) and became involved with the Deaf community.
In 1988, he moved to New York City. In short order, his play SNOOTY (available in his collection WHISPERS OF A SAVAGE SORT) won first place in the New York Deaf Theater's 1990 Samuel Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition, and his essay "Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer" won acceptance as a cover story for CHRISTOPHER STREET magazine. (The essay was expanded into his memoir ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.) His novel MEN WITH THEIR HANDS won a first-prize award from the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation for Full-Length Fiction 2003 in the spring of 2004. The book has gone on to win first place in the Project: QueerLit 2006 Contest; Rebel Satori Press will publish it in December 2009. A playwright and filmmaker, Luczak now lives in Minneapolis, where he has just completed his next novel.
His web site is www.raymondluczak.com. He maintains a blog at http://deafwoofbarks.blogspot.com/ .
