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Q. R. Hand, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1937. He is the author of three poetry books, i speak to the poet in man (jukebox press, 1985), how sweet it is (Zeitgeist Press, 1996), and whose really blues, new & selected poems (Taurean Horn Press, 2007). He was a member of the poetry and jazz ensemble Word Wind and worked as a community mental health worker in San Francisco, where he lived for more than four decades. He died on December 31, 2020.
The author of many collections of poetry, Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats is a collection of poetry memorializing his friends and loved ones who had fallen victim to AIDS.
Born on January 7, 1919, in Oakland, California, Robert Duncan took an active role in emerging arts movements and communitites at the time—including Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain College—and developed a style uniquely his own.
James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926.
The author of numerous books of poetry and prose, former Chancellor Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, among others.
Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1905, Kenneth Rexroth is the author of several collections of poetry and became known as the "father of the Beats."