Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1934

Joanne (Elizabeth) Kyger was born on November 19, 1934, in Vallejo, California, the daughter of Jacob Holmes (a career navy officer) and Anne (Lamont) Kyger. When Kyger was young, the family moved around frequently because of her father's naval career, but when she was fourteen, the family settled permanently in Santa Barbara, California. Kyger attended high school in Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara College (now University of California, Santa Barbara) from 1952 to 1956, although she left college one course short of a degree. Introduced to the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot at college, she soon discovered that she wanted to be a writer. Moving to the North Beach district of San Francisco and working at a bookstore by day, she would write poetry in the evenings and take it to The Place, a bar in North Beach where the bohemian...