About the Author

Beat generation poet Elise Cowen was born in 1933 into a middle class Jewish family in Washington Heights, New York. While attending Barnard College she began a brief relationship with Allen Ginsberg, remaining close to him the rest of her life. From 1956 until 1962 she moved back and forth between California and New York, struggling with increasingly severe psychological breakdowns. She committed suicide in 1962 by jumping through a closed window at her parents house. After her death, the bulk of Cowen's writing was destroyed at the behest of her parents, who were uneasy with her representations of sexuality and drug use, but a handful of poems and fragments have survived and reached publication.

Tony Trigilio's recent books include the poetry collections THE COMPLETE DARK SHADOWS (OF MY CHILDHOOD) (BlazeVOX Books, 2014), WHITE NOISE (Apostrophe Books, 2013) and HISTORIC DIARY (BlazeVOX Books, 2010), and the critical monograph Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics, which was released in a new edition by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012. He is the editor of ELISE COWEN: POEMS AND FRAGMENTS (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and co-editor of the anthology Visions and Division: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008). He directs the program in Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College Chicago and is a co-founder and co-editor of Court Green.