Pommy-Vega, Janine

The American poet Janine Pommy-Vega was born in 1942 in Jersey City, New Jersey. During the early 1960s she moved to Greenwich Village, became acquainted with the Beat writers Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, and married the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega. Following Vega’s death from a drug overdose in 1965, Pommy-Vega wrote and published her first book, Poems to Fernando, with City Lights Books in 1968. She has traveled extensively in North and South America, and in Europe. An extended stay at Lake Titicaca in Peru resulted in the material for two of the books included in this collection, Journal of a Hermit (1974) and Morning Passage (1976).

Pommy-Vega has published nine volumes of poetry over the course of her career. Since 1975 she has been involved with the New York Poets in the Schools program. She has also been involved in poetry in the prisons programs and is a co-founder and coordinator for the poetry workshop at Sing Sing, the state prison at Ossining, New York.

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