Immediately after she graduated from high school, Persky's neighbor Koutoukas, a playwright, told her that he had written a play for her. He cast her, with the salary of $25 per week, as "Cordelia Wells, The World's Most Perfect Teenager" in Grandmother Is in the Strawberry Patch.[2] The play was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and was the first of several collaborations between Persky and Koutoukas.[5] In 1976, she performed as Mary-Eleanor in Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars, directed by Ron Link and starring Divine.[6]
She has since appeared in many plays, including on Broadway in Steaming,[7] and has received critical acclaim for her stage performances in Los Angeles. She received the Drama-Logue and LA Weekly Theater awards (for Best Actress) for Mayo Simon's These Men, in which she starred at the Los Angeles Actors Theatre Company and for Hearts on Fire at the Odyssey.[8] She also received a Drama Critics Circle award nomination (for Outstanding Performance) for These Men.[citation needed]
An early participant in the CBGB music scene, she was a founding staff member at New York Rocker magazine.[14] During that era, she documented the burgeoning punk and new wave movement as a writer and a photojournalist. She revisited the era on the "New York Rockers" panel at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference.[15]
As a journalist, her work has appeared in publications including Fortean Times[16] and LA Weekly.[17] In 2010, she became a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she was also art director. She left the publication in December 2012.
Her fiction has appeared, among other places, in the magazines BOMB[18] and Eclectica (where, billed as Eljay Persky, she was one of 30 writers selected to be anthologized in its Eclectica: Best Fiction Vol. 1 collection).[19]
Visual art
In addition to her fine-art photography, her photography has been featured in magazines such as Mojo, Q, and Uncut, and in books, including Gary Valentine's memoir, New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation,[20]Punk: The Whole Story,[21] and Lance Out Loud,[22] to which she also contributed an essay. Her collage work has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times and LA Style, and it earned her an Award for Design Excellence from Print magazine. In 2008, she co-produced and curated Los Angeles Loteria; An Exploration of Identity, an edition of prints in honor of the 40th anniversary of Aardvark Letterpress.[23][24] In 2012, she contributed the foreword to the catalog for photographer Bobby Grossman's exhibit Low Fidelity - The Photos of Bobby Grossman.[25]
In 2009, Persky began making appearances on The Best Show on WFMU radio program, as both a regular caller and as an in-studio special guest. She is also a semi-regular on the Life Elsewhere program on WMNF in Tampa, Florida.[26]
Persky occasionally has appeared at fan conventions, including the 20th anniversary celebration for Quantum Leap[27] and at the 2013 New York/New Jersey KISS Expo.[28]
