Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. Founder of the famed City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, he is an activist, painter, and author of numerous works of poetry, prose, and drama. His A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the bestselling poetry books of all time. Among his many honors are the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Kirsch Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Award, and the ACLU’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. He is also a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He lives in San Francisco, right above his bookstore.