Diane di Prima

US Beat poet, playwright, photographer, collagist, teacher and anarchist, born. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. She began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with fellow anarchist poet Kenneth Patchen. She lived and wrote in Manhattan for many years, where she became known as an important but neglected writer of the Beat movement. During that time she co-founded the New York Poets Theatre, and founded the Poets Press, which published the work of many new writers of the period. Together with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) she edited the literary newsletter, 'The Floating Bear' (1961-69). Her work with the NY Poets Theatre and 'The Floating Bear' resulted in several charges for obscenity, and in 1961 she was actually arrested by the FBI for publishing two poems in 'The Floating Bear'. According to di Prima, police persistently harassed her due to the nature of her poetry.

In the late 1960s, she moved permanently to California, where she has lived ever since. Here, di Prima became involved with the Diggers and maintained her radical social and poltical stance. She is also the mother of 5 children, about which she has said: “I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.… So my feeling was, ‘Well’—as I had many times had the feeling—‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’” In 2013 Diana was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Amongst here published works are: 'This Kind of Bird Flies Backward' (1958); 'Dinners and Nightmares' (short stories; 1961); 'The New Handbook of Heaven' (1963); 'Poets Vaudeville' (1964); 'Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin' (translations; 1965); 'Poems for Freddie' (1966); 'Earthsong: Poems 1957-1959' (1968); 'Hotel Albert' (1968); 'War Poems' (editor; 1968); 'Memoirs of a Beatnik' (fictionalised biography; 1969); 'L.A. Odyssey' (1969); 'The Book of Hours' (1970); 'Revolutionary Letters' (1971); 'The Calculus of Variation' (1972); 'Loba, Part I' (1974); 'Freddie Poems' (1974); 'Selected Poems: 1956-1975' (1975); 'Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, After an Abortion' (1975); 'Loba As Eve' (1975); 'Loba, Part II' (1976); 'Tribute to Kenneth Patchen' (1977), with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Everson, Hugo Manning, Michael Horovitz et al; 'Loba, Parts I-VIII' (1978); 'Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems' (1990); 'Seminary Poems' (1991); 'Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York Years' (2001); 'The Poetry Deal, City Lights' (2014). Her theatre pieces include: 'Murder Cake' (1960) and 'Paideuma' (1960), both for the Living Theatre; 'The Discontentment of the Russian Prince' (1961); 'Like' (1964); 'Monuments' (1968); 'Discovery of America' (1972); and 'Whale Honey' (1975). "Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity." - Allen Ginsberg