Di Prima was born in Brooklyn and educated at Swarthmore College. She began writing as a child and by the age of nineteen was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards was published in 1958.
Di Prima spent the early 1960s in Manhattan, where she became part of the Beat movement. She edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. In 1966, she moved to Millbrook to join Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community there.
In the early 1970s, she moved to California, where she has lived ever since. Here, she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism and alchemy. She also published her major work, the long poem Loba in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. She teaches and continues writing, having published thirty-five books of poetry. Her selected poems, Pieces of a Song was published in 1990 and a memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, in 2001.Early Life
The Beats
Later Life and Work