About Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Bobbie Louise Hawkins (July 11, 1930 – May 4, 2018) has written more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues. She has performed her work at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, Bottom Line and Folk City in New York City; at The Great American Music Hall and Intersection in San Francisco, as well as readings and performances in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Holland, and more. In England she worked with Apples and Snakes, read at the Canterbury Festival and the Poetry Society. She was commissioned to write a one-hour play for Public Radio’s “The Listening Ear,” and she has two records: one with Rosalie Sorrels and Terry Garthwaite, Live At The Great American Music Hall, available from Flying Fish on Amazon, as well as Jaded Love with Lee Christopher and the Al Hermann Quartet. Her first one-woman show of paintings and collages was at the Gotham Book Mart in 1974. In 1979, she was one of 100 poets from eleven countries to attend the “One World Poetry” festival in Amsterdam. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City.

Bobbie was raised in West Texas, studied art in London, taught in missionary schools in British Honduras, and attended Sophia University.  She received a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). She was invited by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg to begin a prose concentration in the writing program at Naropa University where she taught for over twenty years until her retirement in 2010. She continued to offer readings and teach for Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. Bobbie and Robert Creeley were common-law married for eighteen years.