Book Launch & Reading

Diane di Prima’s Spring and Autumn Annals Release Party

Sat, Oct 30, 2021

4:00 PM–5:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below.

Watch the recording of this event here:

A panel discussion celebrating the City Lights publication of Spring and Autumn Annals: A Celebration of the Seasons for Freedieby Diane di Prima with Ammiel Alcalay, Amber Tamblyn, and Ana Božičević. Moderated by Sara Larsen.

In the autumn of 1964, Diane di Prima was a young poet living in New York when her dearest friend, dancer, choreographer, and Warhol Factory member, Freddie Herko, leapt from the window of a Greenwich Village apartment to a sudden, dramatic, and tragic death at the age of 29. In her shock and grief, di Prima began a daily practice of writing to Freddie. For a year, she would go to her study each day, light a stick of incense, and type furiously until it burned itself out.

The narrative ranges over the decade from 1954–the year di Prima and Herko first met–to 1965, with occasional forays into di Prima’s memories of growing up in Brooklyn. Lyrical, elegant, and nakedly honest, Spring and Autumn Annals is a moving tribute to a friendship, and to the extraordinary innovation and accomplishments of the period. Masterfully observed and passionately recorded, it offers a uniquely American portrait of the artist as a young woman in the heyday of bohemian New York City.

This event is sponsored by the City Lights Foundation and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Read more about this book and these events here “Two New Diane di Prima Books Capture the Brilliance of a San Francisco Treasure” from KQED

Diane di Prima at her swearing in as San Francisco Poet Laureate at the San Francisco Public Library. di Prima served in the role from 2009 to 2011. (© Steve Wilson 2010)

Praise for Spring and Autumn Annals (click here to buy the book and more info):

“The book is a treasure. . . . Diane di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation, and this book offers a window into its lives.”–Chris Kraus

“Diane di Prima’s Spring and Autumn Annals arrives as a long-lost charm of illuminated meditations to love, life, death, eros and selflessness. An essential 1960s text of visionary rapaciousness.”–Thurston Moore

“Di Prima’s poetic memoir of the artist journey is a triumph. A must read and reread for years to come.”–Karen Finley

For questions or accommodation requests for this event, please contact [email protected].