ABOUT LESLIE SCALAPINO
American poet, author, and editor whose works include O and Other Poems and Instead of an Animal. For a 1988 poem entitled "way," she received the American Book Award and the Poetry Center Award.
She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English. She published her debut poetry collection, O and Other Poems, in 1976.
She was associated with both the Language Poets and the Beat poets, though she preferred to be grouped with the latter.
Her childhood was spent traveling all over the world with her father (the founder of the East Asian Studies Institute at the University of California, Berkeley), her mother, and her sisters.
She was a contemporary of fellow American author James Welch .
