American poet, teacher, and editor known for The Salt Ecstasies and other collections of poems. The James White Poetry Prize, an honor given to gay male poets, was established in his honor.
He studied at Indiana University and Colorado State University and later taught children on a Navajo Reservation.
He died from heart disease at the young age of forty-five.
He was an openly gay poet, and The James White Review, a quarterly magazine of gay men's literature, was founded in his honor.
He and poet Allen Ginsberg were both faculty members at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
