"NYU was where I first understood that poetry and punk were doing the same thing — stripping everything down to find what's real."
— Gillian McCain, GSAS '90
About Gillian
Gillian McCain is a poet, author, and oral historian best known for Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, co-authored with Legs McNeil. A graduate of NYU's Graduate School of Arts & Science, she completed her MFA and remained embedded in the downtown New York literary and music scenes that shaped her most celebrated work. Please Kill Me became the definitive document of American punk — a book assigned in university courses, cited in documentaries, and never out of print since its 1996 publication.