by City Lights Books

Pieces of a Song: selected poems
Diane Di Prima
City Lights Books - 18.00€ -  out of stock

Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

Funeral Diva
Pamela Sneed
City Lights Books - 17.00€ -  out of stock

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears - like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde - whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts the most pressing issues of our time with acerbic wit and audacity.

Poet, professor, and performer, Pamela Sneed is the author of Sweet Dreams, Kong, and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. She was a Visiting Critic at Yale, and at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and is online faculty at Chicago's School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art. She also teaches new genres at Columbia's School of the Arts in the Visual Dept. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni's, The 100 Best African American Poems.

Published October 2020

Funeral Divais the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry.

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