Bobbie Louise Hawkins (1930-2018) wrote more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues. She performed her work at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, Bottom Line and Folk City in New York City; at The Great American Music Hall and Intersection in San Francisco, as well as reading and performing in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Holland, and more. In England she worked with Apples and Snakes, read at the Canterbury Festival and the Poetry Society. She was commissioned to write a one-hour play for Public Radio’s “The Listening Ear,” and she has a record, with Rosalie Sorrels and Terry Garthwaite, Live At the Great American Music Hall, available from Flying Fish. She was invited by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg to begin a prose concentration in the writing program at Naropa University where she taught for twenty years. She was also a visual artist known specifically for her collage work. Growing up in West Texas, Hawkins was raised on the family tales her grandmother told; having spent her childhood reading, Hawkins believed she would someday live in the world she only read about in books. Her life and work intersected with both that of the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain poets.
