Vangelisti, Paul

Biography

Paul Vangelisti was born in San Francisco in 1945 and graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1967 with a B.A. in English and philosophy. He attended Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) for a year as a research fellow and moved to Los Angeles in 1968 to attend the University of Southern California, from which he was awarded a Master of Arts in literature in 1970. Vangelisti started a poetry magazine, Invisible City, in 1971 with John McBride, a friend in San Francisco. They also initiated the book publishing company Red Hill Press. After Invisible City ceased publication with its 26th issue in 1982, Vangelisti sucessively worked on the periodicals Boxcar, which he co-founded with Leland Hickman; Forehead, co-published by Beyond Baroque Foundation; Lowghost ; and currently Ribot . He also co-founded Littoral Books as a co-operative publishing outfit with fellow Los Angeles poets Dennis Phillips, Martha Ronk, and Jed Rasula. Vangelisti has edited a half-dozen anthologies of poetry, including one each in Italian and Polish. His anthologies of Los Angeles area poets, such as Specimin '73, were among the first such collections to begin defining the historical trajectory of post-World War II poetry in Southern California. His first such volume, Anthology of L.A. Poets, was co-edited with Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski. Most recently he edited L.A. Exiles, an anthology of displaced Los Angeles writers.

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