Neeli Cherkovski: (born Nelson Cherry, 1945, Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. Cherkovski has resided in San Franciscosince 1975 where he is known as a poet and memoirist. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in the Riverside area who came to San Francisco to work on the staff of then-State Senator George Moscone. He has written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and Charles Bukowski[1] with whom he co-edited the Los Angeles zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns..[2] Cherkovski produced the first San Francisco Poetry Festival, and in the early-1990s helped to found Café Arts Month, a yearly event celebrating San Francisco's cafe culture.

Poetry critic Gerald Nicosia said of Cherkovski, "...in the end, what stamps Cherkovski's poetry as unique is its unbounded lyricism, a lyrical gift easily greater than that of any other poet of his generation."[3]

Cherkovski is the author of Whitman's Wild Children, a collection of essays about twelve poets he has known: Michael McClure, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, Jack Micheline, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This book combines biography, personal stories, and poetry analyses.

Cherkovski was a writer-in-residence at the New College of California in San Francisco.[citation needed] He taught literature and philosophy there until the school closed in 2008. Cherkovski's body of poetry includes Animal, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Leaning Against Time, for which he was awarded the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. His most recent work is From the Canyon Outward.