Joanne Kyger

born in Vallejo, California in 1934 she is an American poet influenced by her practice of Zen Buddhism and her ties to the poets of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat generation. She has lived on the north coast of California since 1969. She teaches frequently at the New College of San Francisco and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her first book, The Tapestry and the Web was published in 1965. Since then she 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). In 2000, her 1981 collection of autobiographical writings was republished as Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals, 1960 –1964. More recent books include God Never Dies (Blue Press), The Distressed Look (Coyote Books), Again (La Alameda Press), and As Ever: Selected Poems published by Penguin Books; and most recently, About Now: Collected Poems from National Poetry Foundation, which won the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.