Kaye McDonough

Kaye McDonough, poet and adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University Mar. 12, 2014.

Join us for a very special reading as Kaye McDonough returns to San Francisco! Hosted by Fanny Renoir.

McDonough, in her own words: “Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1943 (a good time to be born), raised in the fifties (a dreamlike time to be raised), lived in Berkeley in the sixties (a strange time to have survived). There I first met living, breathing poets. Spent the next twenty years in pre-gentrified San Francisco among poets, artists and friends in search of the Moveable Feast, doing readings, working with Alix Geluardi on her 185 and on my own Greenlight Press. Zelda: Frontier Life in America was published by City Lights in 1978. Legal troubles with the Fitzgerald estate followed. Became involved with Gregory Corso, poet master of prestidigitation and legerdemain, who stood the ancient world on its head. We lived together for a time and had a son, Nile Corso, in 1984. Moved back East in the wake of family illnesses to raise Nile, now 29 studying at Johns Hopkins. I work as an adjunct lecturer at various colleges and universities in the New Haven area and am currently working on a memoir: The Spell of Bohemia.”

A.G. & Neeli Cherkovski kneeling, Neeli’s Doctor boyfriend above his left shoulder, Jack Micheline’s right eye, Kaye McDonough, Nile & Gregory Corso and friends from Trieste Coffeeshop March 16 or thereabouts 1985, Jesse Cabrera rear right, 1985

Kaye McDonough was a fixture of the North Beach literary community from 1965 to 1985, and remains a frequent visitor. Among her many friends are and were Eugene Ruggles, Jack Micheline, George Scrivani, Jack Hirschman, Tisa Walden, Neeli Cherkovski, Marty Matz, Gerald Nicosia, and Kirby Doyle. She’s read at City Lights on multiple occasions, and published an edition of seminal North Beach poetry magazine Beatitude.