My Bio

My Biography

A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer.  He is a graduate of San Francisco State University.  He returned home from Panama in February 1958 to become part of the Beat and post-Beat era.  He is the author of over 45 books and chapbooks of poetry and prose.  Major books include The Holy Grail: The Charles Bukowski Second Coming Revolution, North Beach Revisited, and This Land Is Not My Land, which won a 2007 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Most recent books include  The Wrong Side Of Town and The World's Last Rodeo.  In 2007 Presa Press published a book of his Selected Poems: The Other Side Of Broadway: Selected Poems 1995-2005.  A new book of poems, Love -0 will be published  this summer by Cross-Cultural Communications.  He won a February 2007 Beat Poet of the month honor by the Beat Museum.  Palomar Press will publish a book of his poems (No Room For Buddha) in spring 2009. 

From 1972 to 1989 he edited and published  Second Coming Magazine and Presss, which produced a large number of books and anthologies, among them the highly acclaimed  California Bicentennial Poet's Anthology.  He worked for the San Francisco Art Commission, Neighborhood Arts Program from 1975 to 1980, during which time he produced the Second Coming 1980 Poets and Music Festival, honoring the late poet Josephine Miles and the great blues musician, John Lee Hooker.

He has received numerous editor and publisher grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council, and writer assistance grants from PEN and the Academy of American Poets.  In 1983 he was awarded a San Francisco Arts and Letters Foundation cash award for his contribution to small press literature.  He has read his poetry with many acclaimed poets, among them:  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Diane DiPrima, all four San Francisco Poet Laureats, and the late Charles Bukowski, Jack Micheline and Bob Kaufman.

His poetry, prose,  articles, essays, and book reviewes have appeared in well over a thousand literary magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Journal, Poetry Australia, The New York Quarterly, Beatitude, Beat Scene, Rattle, The Smith, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and Inside the Outside.  In  April 2004 a poem of his was set to music and performed at Tully Hall, NYC.

His work has been praised by writers like Colin Wilson, Studs Terkel, James Purdy, Peter Coyote, Herbert Gold, Antler, Hirschman, and the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski.  He has worked at a variety of jobs, most recently with the U.S. Dept. of Education (Office For Civil Rights) as an Equal Opportunity Specialist, investigating claims of discrimination against minorities, women and the disabled.

Winans is a member of PEN, and has served on the Board of Directors of various art organizations, including the now defunct Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP), The South of Market Cultural Center, and Friends of Services For the Arts.   He is listed in the International Directory of who's who in poetry, the Gale Research Contemporary American Authors series, the Gale Research Contemporary authors autobiography series, and Who's Who in America.  His essay on the late Bob Kaufman was published in  the American Poetry Review and will be republished in 2007 by The Writer's Research Group.  His archives and the archives of Second Coming are housed at Brown University.