Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger:  studied at University of California, Santa Barbara. She moved to San Francisco in 1957 and became involved in the beat poetry scene.  In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan, where they soon married.  She later traveled to India with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky.  She returned to the United States in 1964 and her first book, The Tapestry and the Web was published the next year.  Kyger has published more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including, Going On: Selected Poems, 1958 –1980, (1983) and Just Space: Poems, 1979 –1989, (1991).  She has lived in Bolinas, California since 1968, where she has edited the local newspaper and done some occasional teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.  In 2000, her 1981 collection of autobiographical writings was republished as Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals, 1960 –1964, which Anne Waldman has called “one of the finest books ever in the genre of ‘journal writing’.”  More recent poetry collections include God Never Dies (Blue Press), The Distressed Look (Coyote Books), Again (La Alameda Press), and As Ever: Selected Poems published by Penguin Books.  Her most recent book is About Now: Collected Poems from National Poetry Foundation.  It won the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Poetry.