City Lights Foundation
I have been serving on the Board of Directors of the City Lights Foundation since 2020. We support the organization with its publisher Elaine Katzenberger as it moves into a post-founder era.
Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where book lovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture’s only “Literary Landmark.”
In 1955, two years after opening his paperback bookshop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series. Within a year City Lights had published its fourth and its most famous title, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, a book that revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness. City Lights has always been a champion of progressive thinking, fully committed to publishing works of both literary merit and social responsibility. With over 200 titles in print, we publish cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.
I started my own career as a literary editor at City Lights, under the mentorship of executive editor Nancy J. Peters, and worked in the publishing company and bookstore from 1984-1995. I started collaborating there with fellow City Lights employee Rex Ray, who would go on to design many of the covers of my books for the next 20 years.
In this current moment of evolution and transformation for City Lights, the Foundation’s aim is to protect and preserve the institution into the future, and to foster an active engagement with books and literary culture. Public events, the publishing program, and educational outreach are dedicated to sustaining a vibrant community of readers, writers, and independent thinkers in the Bay Area and worldwide.