Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934 – October 25, 2020) was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba,^{[citation needed]} a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.

Di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, 1934. She was a second generation American of Italian descent. Her father Francis was a lawyer, and her mother Emma (née Mallozzi) was a teacher. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an activist and associated with anarchists Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. Di Prima changed her last name from DiPrima to di Prima because she believed it better reflected her Italian ancestry.

She attended academically elite Hunter College High School where she became part of a small group of friends including classmate Audre Lorde who formed a sort of Dead Poets Society calling themselves "the Branded". They cut class to roam the city, hanging out in bookstores, sharing their own poetry and holding séances for dead poets.

Di Prima then went on to Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published in 1958 by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.

Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City, and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently.

She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear. In 1961 she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (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 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community.

From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman (co-founders of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others.

In the late 1960s, di Prima moved permanently to California. There, she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism, and alchemy. In 1966, she signed a vow of tax resistance to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, she published the collection Revolutionary Letters, influenced by her time with the Diggers. At The Band's famous Last Waltz concert in 1976, she read aloud from Revolutionary Letters and the one-line poem "Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife".