Gerald Locklin

Locklin died from COVID-19 exactly one month before his 80th birthday amid the COVID-19 pandemic in California.

Locklin wrote a memoir of that friendship, Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet, that was published in 1995.

He was a friend of Charles Bukowski, whom he first met in 1970, when he arranged for Bukowski to give a reading at CSU, Long Beach. Whereas Bukowski was an avatar of the "Meat School" of poetry that flourished in the 1960s and '70s, Locklin was considered a "Stand-Up" poet. According to Locklin, Charles Harper Webb defined "Stand-Up" poets as having "the qualities of directness, humor, pathos, performability, accessibility, [and] manliness...."

Locklin's first poem was published in Wormwood Review, which also published Bukowski. His first chapbook, Sunset Beach, was published in 1967. Locklin has published over 3,000 poems, works of fiction, reviews and articles that have appeared in numerous periodicals. He has published in excess of 125 books, chapbooks, and poetry broadsides.

He taught at Long Beach State from 1965 to 2007 and was also a part-time lecturer in the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program. From 1964 to 1965, he was an instructor at California State University, Los Angeles.

Locklin was born and raised in Rochester, New York. He received a bachelor’s degree from St. John Fisher College in 1961, an M.A. from the University of Arizona in 1963 and a Ph.D. from the institution in 1964.

Gerald Locklin (February 17, 1941 – January 17, 2021) was an American poet. He was a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach and the poetry editor of Chiron Review.