Gregg Bordowitz is an award-winning artist, writer, and activist. His films—including Fast Trip, Long Drop(1993); A Cloud in Trousers (1995); The Suicide (1996); and Habit (2001)—have shown internationally in screenings and exhibitions at museums including: The New Museum, NY; Artist Space, NY; TATE Modern, UK; MoMA, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Bordowitz is the author of many books, including: The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003, (2006); Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018); General Idea Imagevirus (2010); Volition (2013); and Tenement (2016). In addition, Bordowitz has written numerous catalog and journal essays on art, literature, AIDS, and their intersections. Bordowitz was a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP, and a founding member of the 1980’s film collective Testing the Limits. In 2006, Bordowitz received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art journalism from the College Art Association, and is also the recipient of a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. A long-time faculty member of the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Bordowitz is the Director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Free and open to the public. The poetry reading will be followed by a reception at the Cooley Gallery. Bordowitz's visit is co-sponsored by the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Arts Program, the Cooley Gallery, the Visiting Writers Series, and the Reed College departments of theatre and English.

The Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Visual Arts program was established by a generous 1988 gift from Edward and Sue Cooley and John and Betty Gray in support of art history and its place in the humanities. The program enables Reed College’s art department to bring distinguished individuals in the arts to the college for extended periods. These visitors give public lectures and conduct seminars with students. The intent of the program is to bring to campus creative people who are distinguished in connection with the visual arts and who will provide "a forum for conceptual exploration, challenge, and discovery." The program is named in honor of art historian Dr. Stephen E. Ostrow, as a tribute to his career and out of respect for his advisory role in the formulation of the Cooley-Gray gift and the design of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Ostrow is the Emeritus Chief of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.