Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Bobbie Louise Hawkins (July 11, 1930 – May 4, 2018) was a short story writer, monologist, and poet.

Life Hawkins was born in Abilene in west Texas, to a teenage mother. She was raised by her mother Nora Hall and her stepfather Harold Hall, with guidance from her grandmother, who told her tales of her family. She spent much of her childhood reading, believing "that the world I read in books existed out there." The family later moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she met and married her first husband, Olaf Hoek, a Danish architect. The couple soon moved to England, where she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Arts of the University College London for one year. They later moved to British Honduras, now Belize, where she taught in missionary schools. She also attended Sophia University. The two later divorced after having two daughters. She returned to New Mexico, where she met Robert Creeley, a teacher who later become a famous poet. The two soon married. Creeley believed that any wife of a poet would want to write herself, but derided Hawkins's attempts, to the point that she was "too married, too old, and too late" for her do so. "I was fighting for the right to write badly until I got better." Her first book Own Your Body came out in 1973. Hawkins and Creeley separated in 1975, after Hawkins had two more daughters. Hawkins was an accomplished artist. Her first one-woman show, of paintings and collages, was at the Gotham Book Mart in 1974. Many of her artworks graced her books' covers. In 1978, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg hired her to teach fiction writing workshops and courses unliterary studies at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, now called Naropa University. She remained at the school until her retirement in 2010. After retiring, she continued to offer readings and teach at Naropa's Summer Writing Program.

She wrote a one-hour play for PBS, "Talk", in 1980. She released two CD’s, Live at the Great American Music Hall and Jaded Love. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City. She published 19 books and pieces in over 50 anthologies and journals. As part of the Beat Movement, many of her poems feature unconventional construction. Many of her poems are short, such as "trouble and hope," which has three lines. Her ethic might be best explained in another work of hers, "in time I'll do what":

She was survived by her two daughters from her second marriage, one daughter from her first marriage, and two grandchildren.

Awards National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 1979 Briarcombe Foundation Residency 1983

Works

"On Bobbie Louise Hawkins", Review of Selected Prose and Fifteen Poems by Patrick James Dunagan, October 2012

"life in Bolinas: Bobbie Louise Hawkins, laborin'", article "Panna: 1. Cyril in Texas", Big Bridge #11 "In the Colony", Ploughshares, Spring 1974 "I Owe You One", Ploughshares, Spring 1974 (also recorded on "Live at the Great American Music Hall, 1981 w/Terry Garthwaite and Rosalie Sorrels) "Bathroom/Animal/Castration Story", Ploughshares, Spring 1974

Back to Texas (Bearhug) 1977 republished by Belladonna (New York, 2010). Own Your Body, Black Sparrow Press, 1973

Anthologies

Interview "George Oppen, Mary Oppen and a Poem", Jacket 36, 2008