Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She
attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich
Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat
movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After
joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she
moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The
Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was
named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the
National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody
Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis
Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence
University granted her an honorary doctorate.