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John Curl passed his childhood winters on icy Manhattan streets and summers in steamy New Jersey pine forest farm country. A war baby of World War II, his parents were Irish-Catholic, English-Protestant, and Romanian-Austrian Jew, with one grandfather a Republican, the other a Communist, his parents New Deal Democrats, and on Thanksgiving they all got together and actually had a good time. The astrologers say his chart is a Grand Trine. He lived in a Sixties rural commune in Colorado, worked on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, and has practiced custom woodworking at Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop in Berkeley, CA for over 35 years. He is chairman of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), promoting arts and industries in the manufacturing zone to the dismay of gentrifying developers, and has served as a Berkeley planning commissioner to the consternation of some elected officials. He is a fixture on the committee organizing the annual Berkeley Indigenous Peoples Day Pow Wow. He has a degree in Comparative Literature from CCNY (CUNY) and is a longtime board member of PEN Oakland and PEN USA.
John Curl's books:
HISTORY: For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (PM Press, 2009); History of Work Cooperation in America, (1980); History of Collectivity in the San Francisco Bay Area, (1982).
"It is indeed inspiring to be reminded by Curl's new book For All The People of the noble history of cooperative work in the United States." Howard Zinn
MEMOIR of the 1960s commune movement: Memories of Drop City: The First Hippie Commune and the Summer of Love (2007).
"With this compelling evocation and portrayal of breathing people in Memories of Drop City, John Curl unpacks the boxed lunch myth of America's alternative lifestyle Sixties, and restores the day to day flavor of a deeply fabled era still key to understanding the way we live (and don't live) now." Al Young.
"Curl's characters in Memories of Drop City aspire to be '100 years' ahead of the rest of us, but he shows, through his highly crafted and brilliant novelistic memoir, that they succumb to the same social flaws as the rest of us. This might be the most balanced memoir or novel yet published about the Sixties." Ishmael Reed
TRANSLATION: Ancient American Poets (2006) reveals the very beginnings of American poetry, through translations of work of three American Indian poets from the 1400s, and biographies of the poets. Included are Flower Songs by Nezahualcoyotl (Nahuatl - Aztec), The Songs of Dzitbalche by Ah Bam (Yucatec Maya), and The Sacred Hymns of the Situa by Pachacuti (Quechua - Inca). A radically different vision of the indigenous world in the century before the Conquest.
POETRY: His books of poetry include Scorched Birth (2004), Columbus in the Bay of Pigs (1991), and Decade: the 1990s (1987); Tidal News (1982); Cosmic Athletics (1980); Ride the Wind, (1979); The San Francisco General Strike (1978); Insurrection/Resurrection (1975); Commu 1 (1971); Change/Tears (1967).
"Scorched Birth is a book of wonders." Jack Hirschman
"A Master Poet who uses language in a remarkable, innovative way, he gives us information on contradictions in the evolving state of human consciousness." Mary Rudge
"His is the wholistic vision of Whitman, a hologram
of fragments--each of which mirrors the inner harmonies as they leap out at you, all like circuits
wired to some luminous inner board." Art Goodtimes
'The procreative force, the cosmic sensibility, the
oracular insight Curl brings to the reader is constantly astonishing." Roger Taos
"Pages of truth... It will be hard for me to live each day without quoting from Columbus in the Bay of Pigs." Dennis Banks
THEATER: His play The Trial of Christopher Columbus was produced by the PEN Oakland Writers Theater in Berkeley (2009)
VIDEOS: The Heights of Hungry Coyote (1990); The Columbus Invasion (1991)
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