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Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. His first book Saturday Night: Poems 1960-61 appeared in 1961. During the 1960s, he worked at ARTNews, the Museum of Modern Art, and as associate producer of a show on art for public television.
He moved to Northern California in 1970 and during the next decade edited a series of little magazines and books under the Big Sky imprint.
He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Yale, in many Poets in the Schools programs, and for 24 years at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he is now Professor Emeritus.
He is a corresponding editor for Art in America and has contributed essays to such other journals as Aperture, Artforum, artcritical.com and Modern Painters.
His recent books include Portrait an
d Dream: New & Selected Poems; three collections of criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, For the Ordinary Artist, and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures; an
epistolary collaboration with Bernadette Mayer entitled What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?; and four words-and-images sequences: BILL with Colter Jacobsen; Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman; Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer; and Repeat After Me with John Zurier. A new collection of his poetry, Expect Delays, appeared from Coffee House Press in Fall 2014. His 2006 Russian notebook, Invisible Oligarchs, will appear from Ugly Duckling Presse in spring 2016.
The interview discussed the archive of readings at Penn Sound, and Hyperallergic published a recent piece on Bill that can be read here.
