A descendant of Quakers, Jim Tipton was the embodiment of gentleness, kindness, and fairness-but most of all love. He was a philosopher and practitioner of these values, which came to define him. Tipton was a wanderer and seeker who gravitated to San Francisco in the 1960s and hung out at City Lights Bookstore soaking up the influences of Beat Generation poets. For thirteen years beginning in 1992-2005 he lived a solitary life as a beekeeper in the desert highlands of Colorado, where he studied the minimalist existence of creatures and plants as he searched for answers to what is truly important in life. Although he had written and published poems for many years, it was during this passage that he discovered his most powerful, emotional, and authentic voice in poetry. Tipton published over a thousand poems, short stories, essays, and reviews in journals including The Nation, Southern Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Esquire, International Poetry Review, Modern English Tanka, Modern Haiku, Atlas Poetica, and The Christian Science Monitor. His collection of poems, Letters from a Stranger, with a foreword by Isabel Allende, won the 1999 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Danish, and Norwegian. In 2005, Tipton moved to the village of Chapala in central Mexico, where he mentored a coterie of promising writers and continued to write and publish. He died at home on May 16, 2018, two weeks after the publication of his last collection of poems, The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems.