Beat Scrapbook

Nicosia, Gerald: - Born and educated in Chicago, Gerald Nicosia has spent the past forty years on the West Coast, mainly in the Bay Area. Best known for two large nonfiction works, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac and Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement, he has also worked extensively as a journalist, poet, and organizer of literary events. His biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe, which first came out in 1983 with Grove Press, will soon be published in a fourth, updated and revised edition; and it has been translated into several languages, mostly recently into Mandarin, in Shanghai, China. Having moved to San Francisco in 1979, Nicosia became part of the post-Beat circle of poets in the Bay Area, and eventually numbered many of the Beat poets, including Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, David Meltzer, Jerry Kamstra, Howard Hart, Joanna McClure, Lenore Kandel, and Janine Pommy Vega among his good friends. In 2013, Nicosia received one of the first Acker Awards for avant-garde excellence. He lives in Marin County, California.