23 Facts About Alice Notley

Alice Notley was born on November 8,1945 and is an American poet.

Alice Notley experimented with channeling spirits of deceased loved ones, primarily men gone from her life like her father and her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, and used these conversations as topics and form on her poetry.

Alice Notley is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Alice Notley was born on November 8,1945, in Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California.

Alice Notley wrote extensively of her childhood and early life in her book Tell Me Again.

Alice Notley left Needles for New York City to attend Barnard College of Columbia University in 1963, desiring an escape from the isolation of her hometown.

Alice Notley received a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in spring 1967 and left New York City that fall for the fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Alice Notley was the only woman in her genre and one of two in the entire graduate writing department.

In 1972, Alice Notley married Berrigan and the two moved to Chicago where Berrigan had been given Ed Dorn's newly vacated teaching position at Northeastern Illinois University.

Alice Notley gave birth to their first son, Anselm Berrigan, named after Anselm Hollo, in 1972, as well.

Alice Notley began the magazine to connect with preexisting poet friends and meet new writers on both coasts while living in the midwest.

Alice Notley edited seven of the issues with Berrigan taking over one while Alice Notley was pregnant with their first son.

From February through June 1974 in Wivenhoe, Essex, Alice Notley wrote her book Songs for the Unborn Second Baby.

Alice Notley gave birth to her and Berrigan's second child, Edmund Berrigan, at Colchester Hospital in 1974.

Alice Notley remained fairly prolific during this era, writing and publishing several full-length collections.

In 1986, Alice Notley led a workshop where participants were required to write an entire book during the course of their meetings.

The books were published under the imprint Unimproved Editions and Alice Notley made cover art for the majority of the titles.

In 1992, Alice Notley moved to Paris with her second husband, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver, whom she met while living in England in 1974.

Alice Notley has remained in Paris but makes several trips to the United States each year to give readings and teach small workshops.

In 1999, Alice Notley was both a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.

Alice Notley has stayed very involved in the preservation of both Berrigan and Oliver's works, having edited and written introductions for a number of their books and she continues to be a prolific and powerful force in contemporary poetry, winning the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2015.

Several poems from her 2007 collection In the Pines were set to music by the Canadian indie pop band AroarA for their 2014 Polaris Music Prize-nominated 2013 EP In the Pines and in Fall 2014, a conference celebrating Alice Notley's work was held at the Bay Area Public School in Oakland, California.

Over two nights, November 14 and 15,2016, Alice Notley read The Descent of Alette in its entirety at The Lab in San Francisco.