Linda Chown was born in Berkeley and was an Intellectual History Major at the University of California, in that city during the 1960s events at Berkeley which suffused her with hope about the potential for human improvement and unity. After a year-long trip to Europe, she worked at the San Francisco Poetry Center at the time of the Howl Trial and the regular readings of Ginsberg, Creeley, and others. As a student in the mingled Creative Writing, English MA of that time, she studied Chaucer, John Donne, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson at the same time as participating in scheduling and listening to weekly poetry readings, and giving readings of her own poetry. She then lived in Spain for some 11 years, teaching with the University of Maryland before returning to University of Washington where she got a doctorate in Comparative Literature. Since then she has lived and worked in Michigan.
