Kit Robinson

San Francisco Bay Area poet Kit Robinson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and earned a BA at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Thought Balloon (2019), Leaves of Class (2017), The Crave (2002), and The Dolch Stanzas (1976). A collaborator on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980, Robinson worked with poet Lyn Hejinian in the late 1970s to produce In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings. Robinson has also performed with the San Francisco Poets Theater.
 
In his work, Robinson frequently uses sound to explore the process of creating meaning from daily life and thought. Reviewing Robinson’s selected poems, The Messianic Trees (2009), in Rain Taxi Review of Books, poet Tyrone Williams observed, “From the beginning of his career Robinson has relentlessly poked at the membrane between sense and senselessness, form and chaos, not in order to puncture it but rather to send ripples throughout its structure.”
 
Robinson’s many honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an award from the Fund for Poetry, and a fellowship from the California Arts Council. Robinson lives in Berkeley, where he works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant and plays Cuban tres guitar in the band Calle Ocho.