Historian, journalist, playwright, fiction writer, and poet, Gerald Nicosia is best known for his biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe. He is also the author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement and three books of poetry, the most recent, Embrace of the Lepers, from Mystery Island in Sacramento. Born and educated in Chicago, he has spent the past thirty years as part of the post-Beat circle of writers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Poet as Proteus (poem for David Meltzer)

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