City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the "Sweet Singer of California", she was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including both poetry and prose.
Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.
Diane di Prima was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was part of a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Though often associated with the Beat poets, she would more accurately be considered one of the predecessors of the Beat Generation.
Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist.
Ada Limón is an American poet. On July 12, 2022, she was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States. She is married to Lucas Marquardt.
Vasiliki “Kiki” Dimoula was a Greek poet. She was the first female poet ever to be included in the prestigious French publisher Gallimard’s poetry series.
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld is an English-American author, poet, and visual artist. She is the author of twenty-five books, has a line of fine art cards, and has had numerous gallery and museum awards and exhibitions between 1981 and the present, in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
Alice Low was an American author, lyricist, and editor. Over the course of a 60-year career she wrote more than 25 books for children, edited five anthologies, and wrote the book and lyrics for a musical based on one of her books.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Kim Shuck is a Cherokee Nation poet, author, weaver, and bead work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and also has Sac and Fox and Polish ancestry. She earned a B.A. in art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making.
Chinaka Hodge is an American poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. She has received national recognition for her publications, especially her artistic work on gentrification.
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman is an American author of literary fiction, poetry, true crime, memoir, and nonfiction. Her poetry and first three books were originally published under the pseudonym Sherri Szeman.
Elisabeth Sunday is an American photographer known for her powerful black and white portraits of people in Africa and Asia. Her subjects have included Akan fishermen in Ghana, Koro men in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia, and nomadic women in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, as well as people in Kenya and Zaire.
Persis Maryam Karim is an American poet, essayist, editor, and educator. She serves as the Neda Nobari Distinguished Chair and director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU) since 2017. Her work focuses on Iranians living outside of Iran, specifically Iranian Americans, and their complicated histories and identities which is often presented through storytelling.
Rocky Rivera is a Filipino-American rapper and journalist from San Francisco, CA. She is a member of the hip-hop label, Beatrock Music, where she gained recognition for her socially conscious lyrics and advocacy for social justice. Her style can be described as "militant feminist Hip Hop." The subject matter in her music often touches on issues of sexism, racism, women empowerment, gentrification, systematic oppression, motherhood, capitalism, religion and politics.
