Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer, best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling living author and one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. As of 2021, she has written 190 books, including over 140 novels.
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
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.
John Royce Mathis is an American singer of popular music. Starting his career with singles of standard music, Mathis became highly popular as an album artist, with several dozen of his albums achieving gold or platinum status and 73 making the Billboard charts. Mathis has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for three recordings.
KQED is a PBS member television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by KQED Inc., alongside fellow PBS station KQEH and NPR member KQED-FM (88.5). The three stations share studios on Mariposa Street in San Francisco's Mission District and transmitter facilities atop Sutro Tower.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Mary Roach is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published seven New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021).
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.
Sylvie Simmons is a London-born, California-based music journalist, named as a "principal player" in Paul Gorman's book on the history of the rock music press In Their Own Write. A widely regarded writer and rock historian since the late 1970s, she is one of the few women to be included among the predominantly male rock elite. Simmons is the author of a number of books, including biography and cult fiction. Simmons is also a singer-songwriter, ukulele player and recording artist.
Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist.
The San Quentin Six were six inmates at San Quentin State Prison in the U.S. state of California who were charged with actions related to an August 21, 1971 escape attempt that resulted in six deaths and at least two persons seriously wounded. They were Fleeta Drumgo, David Johnson, Hugo Pinell, Johnny Larry Spain, Willie Tate, and Luis Talamantez. The dead included George Jackson, a co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family; two other inmates, and three guards.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Erika Chong Shuch is an American theatrical performer, director, choreographer, and educator based in San Francisco, California. Her work has appeared on stages in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington, DC, and Seoul, South Korea.
Marty Links was an American cartoonist best known for her syndicated comic strip Emmy Lou.
Chinaka Hodge is an American poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. She has received national recognition for her publications, especially her artistic work on gentrification.
Susan O’Malley (1976–2015) was an artist and curator from the San Francisco Bay Area, and author of the 2016 book Advice from My 80 Year-Old Self.
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.
Mary Fabilli was an American poet and illustrator who for many years made her living as an art teacher and curator at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California. She was for a time married to poet William Everson and was close friends with poet Robert Duncan, both associated with the Berkeley Renaissance and the San Francisco Renaissance in nearby San Francisco. Fabilli's published work centered on her personal experiences, particularly those related to her Italian heritage and her Roman Catholic faith, and she did not consider herself to be a Beat poet.
ruth weiss, born Ruth Elisabeth Weisz, was a poet, performer, playwright and artist. Born in Germany, but of Austrian citizenship, weiss made her home and career in the United States. She was considered to be a member of the Beat Generation, a label she, in later years, embraced.
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.
