Neeli Cherkovski is a longtime contributor to the West Coast literary scene. Emerging from the Los Angeles underground of the Sixties, Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic and literary biographer. He has written ten books of poetry, including: From the Canyon Outward, the award winning Leaning Against Time , Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography; his book, Whitman's Wild Children (a collection of critical memoirs), has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Gun s with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. For ten years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy. Cherkovski died at the age of seventy-eight on March 19, 2024.