Ken Wainio was born in Ukiah, California, about two hours north of San Francisco, in 1952. He began to write at age fifteen--having been influenced by the writings of the French poets Lautreamont, Rimbaud, and Nerval. He moved to San Francisco at the beginning of the 1970s to study at San Francisco State University with the Greek surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis, and met the American surrealist poets Philip Lamantia and Stephen Schwartz. A couple of years later, in an informal "poetry class" being conducted in the home of Harold Norse, he met Thomas Rain Crowe, Neeli Cherkovski and Luke Breit--along with whom he would later help to resurrect Beatitude magazine. Wainio was co-editor of issue No. 26 which appeared in 1977. During the 1970s, his poems were regularly published in Bay area literary magazines. With Jerry Estrin, Wainio was a founding editor of the surrealist publication Vanishing Cab . After driving a taxicab for the entire decade of the 1980s, he moved to Glenhaven, California. His travels took him to Greece and Egypt, where he spent considerable time in the 1980s and 1990s. His poems and fiction were published both in America and abroad in such journals as Nexus, Asheville Poetry Review, Litterature en Marche and Gregas in Montpellier, France. His books included Crossroads of the Other (written in the 1970s and published in 1994), Letters to Al-Kemi, Starfuck (a novel published on computer disk in 1996) and Automatic Antiquity (a collection of poetry published in 2004). Wainio died on January 26, 2006.
Biographical note source: The Baby Beats & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance . New Native Press, 2005.
From the guide to the Ken Wainio Papers, 1970-1999, (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)
