Allen Ginsberg’s celebrated poem “Howl,” overcame censorship to become one of the more widely read poems of the twentieth century. Expelled from Cuba, and Czechoslovakia, crowned Prague May King, and placed on the FBI’s Dangerous Security List all within the same year Ginsberg later traveled to and taught in China, Russia, India, Australia, Latin America, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where he received Macedonia’s Struga Poetry Festival “Golden Wreath” in 1986. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Award in 1991 and France’s “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” in 1993. As well as co-founding the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics at Naropa University, the first accredited Buddhist College in the Western world, he was Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College from 1986 till his death.
Born June 3, 1926, Newark, NJ, he died due to complications of liver cancer in New York City, April 5, 1997.
