Bill Berkson

Bill Berkson
Berkson speaking in Los Angeles, December 2007
Born	William Craig Berkson (1939-08-30)August 30, 1939 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	June 16, 2016(2016-06-16) (aged 76) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, critic, professor emeritus San Francisco Art Institute
Nationality	American
Children	2 step-children with Lynn O'Hare: Andrew Kleinberg and Lisa Kleinberg-Ellerby

William Craig "Bill" Berkson (August 30, 1939 – June 16, 2016) was an American poet, critic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his early twenties on.

Born in New York City on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the only child of Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service and later publisher of the New York Journal American, and the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. He attended The Day School of the Church of the Heavenly Rest and transferred to Trinity School in 1945. He graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1957. He dropped out of Brown University to return to New York after his father died. He studied poetry at The New School for Social Research with Kenneth Koch. He attended Columbia University and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Having begun writing poetry at Lawrenceville, encouraged there by such teachers as John Silver and the eminent Emily Dickinson scholar, Thomas H. Johnson, he went on to study short story writing with John Hawkes and prosody with S. Foster Damon at Brown. But his full commitment to poetry was prompted under the tutelage of Kenneth Koch in spring, 1959 at the New School for Social Research. It was also through Koch that he was introduced to the poetry and arts community loosely termed the New York School, which in turn led to close friendships with Frank O’Hara and such senior artists as Philip Guston and Alex Katz, as well as with poets and artists of his own generation such as Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll and others.