Leland Hickman

Poet and editor Leland Hickman was born in 1934 in Santa Barbara, California, and attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Berkeley. He served in the Army and pursued acting with theater companies in New York City and Ohio before moving permanently to Los Angeles. In the 1980s, Hickman was poetry editor of Bachy and Boxcar: A Magazine of the Arts. An influential editor of Temblor (1985–1989), he paid particular attention to the work of poets in the Los Angeles area.

Described as “experimental,” Hickman is sometimes grouped with poets such as Kevin Killian and Aaron Shurin. Hickman’s collections of poetry include Great Slave Lake Suite (1980), Lee Sr Falls to the Floor (1991), and the posthumous Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009), edited by Stephen Motika. Hickman’s unfinished long poem “Tiresias” is autobiographical, expansive, and erotic.

Hickman died of complications from AIDS in 1991.