Tim Dlugos
Tim Dlugos was born on August 5, 1950, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1968, he joined the Christian Brotherhood and attended La Salle University in Philadelphia.
After a few years, Dlugos left the Brotherhood for Washington, D.C., where he was active in the poetry, anti-war, and gay communities and worked for Ralph Nader’s newspaper Public Citizen. In the mid-1970s, Dlugos moved to New York City, where he was involved with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and affiliated with poets Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles, among others.
Dlugos authored several collections of poetry, including A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011), a posthumous collection edited by David Trinidad, which won a Lambda Literary Award; Je Suis Ein Americano (Little Caesar Press, 1979); and Entre Nous: New Poems (Little Caesar Press, 1982).
In reference to Dlugos’s work, Ted Berrigan said he was “the Frank O’Hara of his generation.”
After learning he was HIV-positive, Dlugos enrolled at Yale Divinity School in 1988, with the intention of becoming an Episcopalian priest. He died from AIDS-related complications on December 3, 1990.
