Ezekiel "Zeke" Tsieh

is an editor and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, where they specialize in cultural criticism by way of literature and cinema who also happens to maintain a poetry practice

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Trained in both the humanities and social sciences, Zeke’s work often takes them to contemporary Anglophone literature, cinema and post-cinema, 20th- and 21st-century visual art, performance, and increasingly, video games. The theoretical and methodological frames that ground their work are deconstruction, postcolonial theory, feminist/queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Zeke embarrassingly jokes about being a Derrideluzien(ne).

Spending their teenage years at a dedicated school for the arts studying Theatre and Performance Studies, Zeke developed a tendency for avant-gardism. Their creative discipline and artistic philosophy arrive most influentially by way of practitioners and writers identified with the post-aesthetic, post-cinematic, and post-dramatic. In other words, Zeke is simply over it.

Zeke earned their bachelor’s degree with honors, majoring in American Studies and Comparative Literature at N.Y.U., graduating as the Departmental Valedictorian for American Studies as well as summa cum laude from the College of Arts & Science. Their senior honors thesis project, Desire and Subjectivity in the Postcolonial Self, examined how memory and post-memory structured and continue to inform the postcolonial subject’s object of d/Desire. It did this through examining a range of contemporary world literatures: cinema, lyric poetry, the novel, and the playscript.  

Hungry still to continue the research they had begun in their thesis, Zeke decided to attend Penn State’s fully-funded M.A. program in English. At Penn State, Zeke was awarded the Edwin Erle Sparks Graduate Fellowship for their first year of study.

While still in M.A. coursework, Zeke continued to conduct research on subjectivity as it appears in contemporary culture both independently and as a research assistant for Dr. Christian P. Haines. Labeled a “Theory and Culture” student in their program, Zeke completed graduate-level seminars on a variety of subjects, ranging from cinema, to lyric poetry, to contemporary ethnic American literature; from biopower and biopolitics to Afropessimist thought; from race and representation to feminist ethics and trans-of-color critique. Their coursework culminated in a graduate thesis that considered David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives (1991) alongside the documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993). This thesis, entitled An Orthography of Illness, argued that living with HIV/AIDS necessitated, and therefore engendered, new modes of relation — some good, some bad — that in turn, form the very basis of queer subjectivity in the United States today.

In chronological order, Zeke’s work has generously been published by the following parties and publications: TheatreWorks; the Journal of Social and Cultural Analysis (N.Y.U.); the Historian Research Journal (N.Y.U.); the Minetta Review (N.Y.U.); the Gallatin Review (N.Y.U.); Protean Magazine; The Margins (A.A.W.W.); and the Woodward Review.

Aside from looking for more stable employment and taking on freelance gigs, Zeke is, (1) in the process of adding to and revising their Master’s thesis since new research has developed; (2) at work on their second book of creative writing, tentatively titled All My Friends Are Either Dead Or Alive & I Can’t Tell You Which Is Worse; (3) in the early stages of drafting a project that would examine J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961) as the absurdist critique par excellence of the postwar American petit bourgeoisie.

Last Updated : 6/7/2023