Ted Pearson was born and raised on the San Francisco peninsula, a seventh generation Californian. After early musical training, he began writing poetry in 1964, and subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he published his first book, The Grit and began his long association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published over thirty books of poetry. He co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography. He edited a posthumous edition of Craig Watson's last poems, Epilogue. And he co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson. His essays have appeared at intervals since 1975. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.