Bobbie Louise Hawkins was born July 11, 1930, in Abilene, Texas. The author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Fifteen Poems (Belladonna, 2012), she was a prolific member of the Beat movement. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art of the University College London. After returning to the United States, she met Robert Creeley and the two were married for eighteen years. She was a recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, for more than thirty years, retiring in 2010. She died on May 4, 2018, in Boulder.