A Tribute to Diane di Prima

Neeli Cherkovski is a poet, memoirist, literary chronicler, and editor. His latest books of poetry are Hang on the Yangtze River and Elegy for My Beat Generation. He is also the biographer of Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the recipient of an American Book Award and the Josephine Miles PEN Award.

Writer and poet Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Sigo is the author of Royals (Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), and Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010). Of his work, Ron Silliman writes, “Cedar Sigo is a Frank O’Hara for the 21st century: witty, erudite, serious, with a terrific ear and eye for the minutest details, at home in the world of the arts.” He has taught at St. Mary’s College and Naropa University. He lives in Lofall, Washington.

One of the most urgent and critical art writers working today, David Levi Strauss’s work focuses on the intersection between image and text, and the third space that is created through that interaction. He is the author of Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture, 2012), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (Aperture, 2014), and other books. His latest work is Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020) exposing a new ‘iconopolitics’ in which words and images lose their connection to reality.⁠

Poet, curator, professor, performer, cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa Institute. She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for nuclear warheads. Author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism among several others. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery. NEW WEATHERS, Poetics from the Naropa Archive , Nightboat 2022 has just gone to press.

Poet, translator, critic and scholar, Ammiel Alcalay is the author of from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque 2002), a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East, a lecture given at Cornell (Palm Press 2003), and others. He is a regular contributor to the Village Voice and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, and various other publications. He teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center.

American poet Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn. He attended CUNY and Columbia University and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. He has authored more than 60 published volumes of fiction, poetry, and prose-poems. His 1967 debut novel The Scorpions first brought him a cult readership, and in 1980 his book Kill The Messenger won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has served as the poet-in-residence at many notable universities, including the California Institute of Technology (1971–72), Yale University (Calhoun College), University of Kansas, Dickinson College, and the University of Southern California. His fiction has been translated variously into Italian, German, and French. He was the 2016–2017 Poet Laureate of Dutchess County, New York.

Poet and writer living in Oakland, CA, Sara Larsen’s latest book The Riot Grrrl Thing (Roof 2019) is a polyvocal exploration of punk and poetics. Previous books include Merry Hell (Atelos 2016) and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous (Printing Press 2014). Larsen is the author of several chapbooks, including Our Ladies, Riot Cops En Route To Troy, The Hallucinated, and others.

Poet and essayist Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020). Other works include Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (2012) and King of Shadows (2008). A pioneer in both LGBTQ+ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.