1937—2017

Poet, editor, and teacher Larry Fagin earned his BA at the University of Maryland. After graduation he traveled to Los Angeles, London, and San Francisco, during which he befriended many poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan. He settled in the East Village of Manhattan in 1968 and was often associated with the New York School of Poets. His later books included Eleven Poems for Philip Guston (Granary Books, 2016), Complete Fragments (Cuneiform Press, 2012), and Dig & Delve (Granary Books, 1999). He also published a book for poetry teachers, The List Poem: A Guide to Teaching and Writing Catalog Verse (NCTE, 1991). On Fagin's poetry, Peter Schjeldahl wrote in Poetry magazine, “Like some of the best young poets now emerging, Fagin seems determined never to write the same poem twice. He does not appear interested in establishing a "voice" or staking out an area of poetic competence. Rather, he explores the possibilities of poetry as an activity, like the theater or a sport, where each act is a unique performance demanding nerve and guile. The poems that result are as lean and snappy as terriers, and just as much fun.”

In the early 1970s, Fagin served as assistant director of the Poetry Project in New York and began editing and publishing the journal Adventures in Poetry (1968-1975), which later became a publishing label in 2001. He also taught at the Naropa Institute from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. He died in 2017.