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The text of Berserker consists of original material written by Paul Outlaw and material from the following sources: Nat Turner was born into slavery in 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia. In August 1831 he led a small army of slaves on a thirty-six-hour rampage through the county, in which they axed or beat to death fifty-nine white men, women and children. Turner was tried and sentenced to execution. He was hanged and then skinned in November 1831. While awaiting trial he was interviewed by an attorney, who subsequently published his version of Turner’s statements in a pamphlet entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner. Jeffrey Dahmer was born in 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At his arrest in July 1991, he admitted to the murders of seventeen young men over the course of thirteen years. In addition, these men, primarily of Asian and African-American descent, had been photographed, dismembered, sexually abused and, in some cases, cannibalized by Dahmer. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, where he was killed by a fellow inmate in 1994. While awaiting trial he made a 160-page confession to the police and was interviewed by attorneys and psychologists; at his sentencing, he read a typewritten statement to the court. |
Essex Hemphill (author) was a writer, poet and cultural activist. He is known for his participation in the films Black Is/Black Ain’t and Tongues Untied. He edited Conditions and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, which won a Lambda Literary Award. His collection Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry appeared in 1992 and won the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. He was a visiting scholar at The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1993. Hemphill died from AIDS complications in 1995. Excerpts from his essay “Ceremonies” and his poem “Balloons” are used in Berserker. |
Samuel
R. Delany (author) is a critic and novelist, with essays
and interviews so far collected in seven volumes, the most recent
three of which are Silent Interviews, Longer Views
and Shorter Views. He has written a highly praised
autobiography The Motion of Light in Water and the
best-selling Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and,
among his fiction, The Mad Man and Dhalgren.
Mr. Delany is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards
for science fiction. He is a recipient of the Pilgrim Award
for outstanding scholarship in the field of science fiction
studies and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s
contribution to Lesbian and Gay Literature. His scholarly interests
include Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, Hart Crane,
and contemporary poetics, as well as questions of race, gender,
queer studies, and literary theory. After eleven years as a
comparative literature professor at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst (where he received the Chancellor’s Medal for
Distinguished Intellectual Service to the University) and a
year and a half as an English professor at the SUNY Buffalo,
Mr. Delany began as a professor of English and creative writing
at Temple University in January 2001. An excerpt from Flight
From Nevérÿon’s “The Tale of Fog
and Granite” is used in Berserker . |
