In the decade leading up to the founding of Poets Press in the mid-1960s, di Prima had been active in many creative endeavors, including writing, publishing, and most notably coediting The Floating Bear newsletter with poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), which they began in 1961. Her significant works include poetry collections such as the radical Revolutionary Letters (1968) and feminist epic Loba (1973), the autobiographical erotic novel Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), and her memoir of living in Greenwich Village during the 1950s and early 1960s, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001). Di Prima is perhaps best known as the most visible woman poet in the male-dominated scene of the Beats, but she has been a prolific writer with a career that has extended well beyond one literary movement. Although I had long been an admirer of di Prima’s writing, I had not been aware of her work as a publisher. It was one sentence in a biography that highlighted numerous other activities, interests, and accomplishments. There was a brief mention of Poets Press, a publishing venture she had run in the 1960s. I was preparing notes for a class session on mid-century underground writers, and while skimming a reference book about the Beat Generation, I came across an entry on Diane di Prima. My first encounter with Poets Press came entirely by chance.
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