Full program video: Neeli Cherkovski and Jim Dunn: September 5, 2019
Video highlight clips: Jim Dunn reads "All Lit Up" | Neeli Cherkovski reads "For Lorca" (for Lorca Ballard) | Jim Dunn and Neeli Cherkovski respond to a question from the audience asking what they have in common
The Poetry Center's Fall 2019 season opens with readings followed by a conversation with the audience by San Francisco poet, biographer, and literary chronicler of the Beat Movement, Neeli Cherkovski, together with Boston poet Jim Dunn on a rare visit to San Francisco. We welcome both for their first reading for The Poetry Center. This event is free and open to the public.
Neeli Cherkovski was born in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles). He is the author of many books of poetry, including Animal (1996), Leaning Against Time (2005), From the Canyon Outward (2009), The Crow and I (2015), and Elegy for My Beat Generation (2018). Forthcoming is Coolidge and Cherkovski in Conversation (with Clark Coolidge). He is the coeditor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski), Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco (with Bill Mohr), and Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (with Raymond Foye and Tate Swindell). He has also published bilingual editions in Austria, Mexico, Italy, and Greece. A facsimile edition of one of his notebooks was published by Viviani Edizione in Verona, Italy. Cherkovski also wrote biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski, as well as the critical memoir Whitman’s Wild Children (1988). His papers are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cherkovski received the 2017 Jack Mueller Poetry Prize awarded at the Jack Mueller Festival in Fruita, Colorado. He has lived in San Francisco since 1974.
Jim Dunn is a poet and author of Soft Launch (Bootstrap, 2008), Convenient Hole (Pressed Wafer, 2004), and Insects In Sex (Falling Angel Press, 1995). His work has appeared in several publications, including spoKe, Polis, Bright Pink Mosquito, The Process, eoagh, Gerry Mulligan, Cafe Review, and The Battersea Review. He edited the poet John Wieners' journal, A New Book From Rome, with Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher of Bootstrap Press. Along with Kevin Gallagher, he also edited an extensive feature on six Massachusetts poets, for Jacket 2 magazine.