ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE EDITOR

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was an American poet often identified, along with his friends Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, with the San Francisco Renaissance. Proudly queer at a time of legal and social oppression, Spicer was also charming, truculent, inspiring, and enraging to those in his artistic and social circles. During his short but prolific life, he published numerous books with small presses, including After Lorca (1957), Billy the Kid (1958), and The Holy Grail (1965). In 2008, Wesleyan University Press published My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which won the 2009 American Book Award for poetry.

Daniel Katz is professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. He has been an executive board member of the Samuel Beckett Society, and co-director of Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. He is the founding editor of the Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics book series and author of The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) as well as many other contributions in the fields of modern literature and poetry and poetics.