Joanne Kyger (1934–2017)

Joanne Kyger was born in Vallejo, California on November 3, 1934. She attended the University of California - Santa Barbara and moved to San Francisco in 1957. She joined a community of poets and lived in the communal East West House, where she studied Zen Buddhism. She was a leading poet of the show more San Francisco Renaissance and a female voice of the Beat generation. She wrote almost 30 collections of poetry including The Tapestry and the Web, As Ever: Selected Poems, and On Time: Poems 2005-2014. Her prose collections included Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals 1960-1964 and There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera. She died from lung cancer with complications from osteoarthritis and atrial fibrillation on March 22, 2017 at the age of 82. (Bowker Author Biography) show less