Lynn Lonidier was born in Lakeview, Oregon in 1937. She was a teacher, author, and a multimedia and theater/performance artist. She was active in the San Francisco literary scene especially within the lesbian/feminist community during the 1970s until the time of her death in 1993. Also a musician, she studied and collaborated with Pauline Oliveros at the University of California at San Diego. She also attended San Francisco State University where, as a cellist, she majored in performance. She also received an M.A. in Media Education from the University of Washington at Seattle.
While teaching public school in Northern California in the 1960s, Lonidier participated in the “Poet in the Schools” program. She also helped coordinate the Pegasus Program, sponsored by San Francisco State University, that encouraged public school students to write and publish, under Lonidier’s direction, numerous chapbooks. She also encouraged the writing of bilingual poetry, especially Spanish/English, to children in San Francisco’s Mission District.
During the 1970s and 1980s, she taught and lectured on feminist topics in writing and multimedia performance in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, especially at the San Francisco Women’s Building of which she was a “Founding Mother.”
She was also a “light-optics artist” in 1969 for the Electric Circus in New York City and also worked in the same capacity at the 1970’s World Fair held in Japan.
Lonidier was the recipient of a California Arts Council grant, a member of the Mission Alliance for a Popular Culture. She was associated with the Feminist Writers Guild as well as other Bay Area based writers’ organizations and projects, such as the Lavender Rose Collective founded by Judy Grahn. She performed, read, and lectured extensively throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area at such venues as the Women’s Building, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, Small Press Traffic, as well as many other San Francisco cultural spaces and cafes.
Lonidier’s published collections of poetry include Clitoris Lost: A Woman’s Version of the Creation Myth (1989), The Female Freeway (1970), A Lesbian Estate (1977), Po Tree (1967), and Woman Explorer (1979). Published broadsides include A Jellyfish Swim (1972), Christmas Kitty in Bilingualand, or, What I Did This Year (1986), For Sale: Girl Poet Cheap (1977). She was also published in numerous poetry journals including The Ladder and the San Francisco Review and poetry collections including She Rises Like the Sun (1989) edited by Janine Canan. Lonidier was also the author of several unpublished novels, play, and multimedia/theater works.
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