Literary Salon: Neeli Cherkovski

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.

In honor of National Poetry Month, our April Left Coast Literary Salon Presenter is poet Neeli Chekovski.

Neeli Cherkovski (Santa Monica, CA, 1945)  is an applauded poet, critic, memoirist and literary biographer. He has written twelve books of poetry, including: From the Canyon Outward, the award winning Leaning Against Time, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography. His book, Whitman’s Wild Children (a collection of critical memoirs), has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco . For five years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy. In 2005 Cherkovski won the Pen Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award.  He is also a Friends of the SF Public Library Literary Laureate. Currently Neeli is completing an as yet untitled memoir of his life in poetry, a collection of poems on his travels in the Philippines, and a selected poems.  He teaches in The Floating University, offering courses in poetics, along with David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg.