American poet who wrote The Inheritance and received a National Endowment for the Arts literary grant. Though a friend and contemporary of many of the beatnik poets, she never allied herself with the Beat movement.
She opened a coffee shop in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1965.
She held odd jobs as a tomato cannery worker and a Child Protection Services agent.
She was born into a Polish-American family of Detroit auto workers.
She traveled to Seattle in 1955 to study poetry with Stanley Kunitz.
