A. D. Winans was born in San Francisco and graduated from San Francisco State University. He returned from Panama in 1958 to become part of the Beat and post-Beat era. He is the author of 45 books and chapbooks of poetry and prose including North Beach Poems, The Holy Grail: The Charles Bukowski Second Coming Revolution, North Beach Revisited, This Land Is Not My Land and The Wrong Side Of Town. For seventeen years he edited and published Second Coming Magazine/Press. He worked for the San Francisco Art Commission (1975-80), during which time he produced the Second Coming 1980 Poets and Music Festival, honoring the late poet Josephine Miles and the late blues musician John Lee Hooker. He has received past editor and publishing 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. In 2006 he was awarded a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Achievement Award for his book of poems, This Land Is Not My Land, published by Presa Press.
His poetry, prose, essays and book reviews have appeared in over a thousand literary magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Journal, Poetry Australia, the New York Quarterly, Beat Scene, Beatitude, Rattle, The Smith, the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press), and Inside the Outside, Presa Press. His poetry has been translated into nine languages. In 2004 a song poem of his was performed at Tully Hall, New York City. Such noted poets and writers as Colin Wilson, Studs Terkel, James Purdy, Peter Coyote, Jack Hirschman, and the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski have praised his work. In 2007 Presa Press published a book of his selected poems (The Other Side Of Broadway: Selected Poems 1965-2005) with a foreword by Jack Hirschman (San Francisco Poet Laureate).
He has worked at a variety of jobs, most recently with the U.S. Department of Education (Office for Civil Rights), as an Equal Opportunity Specialist, investigating claims of discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled.
He is a member of PEN, and has served on the Board of Directors of many arts organizations, including the now defunct Committee of Small Press Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP). He is listed in The Gale Research Contemporary American Authors and the Gale Research Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. His essay on the late Bob Kaufman was published in American Poetry Review and was republished in January 2007 by the Writer’s Research Group. His archives and the archives of Second Coming Magazine and Press are maintained at Brown University.
For more information visit his website: adwinans.mysite.com