WKathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, and by philosophy, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.
WRichard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often clinically and surrealistically employs black comedy, parody, and satire, with emotionally blunt prose describing pastoral American life intertwining with technological progress. He is best known for his novels Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968).
WHenry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
WIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
WHedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "American futurism". The term "performance poetry", a precursor to slam poetry, is attributed to her. It originated in press releases for experimental spoken word and conceptual theater Gorski created during 1979. She is a first-generation Polish American academic scholar and accomplished creative writer. The innovative poetry, prose, drama, and audio works are published and produced in a variety of media using standard and experimental forms.
WS.A. Griffin is an American poet, actor, performance artist, and publisher. He co-edited The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He spells his name without a space between the first two initials.
WJack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.
WRobert Garnell Kaufman was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "black American Rimbaud."
WNaphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg was an American counterculture poet, author, singer, cartoonist, pacifist anarchist, publisher, and co-founder of the band The Fugs.
WDavid Lerner was an American renegade poet born in New York City. Lerner came from a family of Russian-Jewish renegades, and grew up as a so-called "red-diaper baby". Lerner published numerous articles as a journalist, including material on the Russian singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky. Lerner pursued a bohemian life and became involved in the notorious Cafe Babar in San Francisco about 1986, a group dubbed as the Babarians. Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeitgeist Press and have been referred to as 'the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the underground.' Lerner's common-law wife, Maura O'Connor also published poetry.
Wd.a. levy, born Darryl Alfred Levey, was an American poet, artist, and alternative publisher active during the 1960s, based in Cleveland, Ohio.
WJack Micheline, born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. One of San Francisco's original Beat poets, he was an innovative artist who was active in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.
WHarold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.
WRamona Lofton, better known by her pen name Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet.
WPatricia Lee Smith is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and poet who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
WWilliam Wantling was an American poet, novelist, ex-Marine, ex-convict, and college professor born in East Peoria, Illinois. After graduating high school he joined the Marine Corps until 1955. He served in Korea during 1953. After leaving the Marines he moved to California and eventually had a son with his then-wife Luana. Wantling went to San Quentin State Prison in 1958 convicted of forgery and possession of narcotics. During his imprisonment Luana divorced him and took custody of the child. He was released in 1963, and returned to Peoria. There he married Ruth Ann Bunton, a fellow divorcee, in 1964. In 1966 he enrolled at Illinois State University, where he received both a BA and MA. He taught at the university up until his death on May 2, 1974. Wantling died of heart failure, possibly brought about by his extensive drug use.
WAllan Davis Winans, known as A. D. Winans, is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and publisher. Born in San Francisco, California, he returned home from Panama in 1958, after serving three years in the military. In 1962, he graduated from San Francisco State College.