Aleta George is the author of the award-winning biography, Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate. She has written for Smithsonian, High Country News, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently the open space reporter for the Bay Area Monitor, a publication of the League of Women Voters.
Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate is a new biography about a pioneer poet, Oakland’s first public librarian, and the most popular literary ambassador in the early American West.
California named Coolbrith its first poet laureate in 1915 during San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and 2015 marks her centennial of being named California’s beloved first lady of poetry and America’s first laureate.