Gerald Nicosia

Born in 1949 and schooled in Chicago, Gerald Nicosia is a biographer, historian, playwright, and novelist, whose work has been closely associated with the Beat Movement as well as the 1960’s. He came to prominence with the publication of “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac” in 1983, a book that earned him the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while it was still a work-in-progress. It was highly praised by writers as diverse as John Rechy, Irving Stone, William Burroughs, Bruce Cook, and Allen Ginsberg, who called it a “great book.” Nicosia spent several decades in both the Chicago and San Francisco literary scenes, making a name for himself as both a post-Beat poet himself and an organizer of marathon literary events. Besides being the editor of major poetry collections, Nicosia was involved in several video and film projects and spent decades studying, working with, and writing about Vietnam veterans in their long process of healing from that war. Thus he has been praised by notable Vietnam veterans like John Kerry and Oliver Stone and also by veterans of America’s later wars and leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War. He has taught Beat literature, the Sixties, and the Vietnam War literally around the world, including in China, where he adopted his daughter.