Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. After attending Providence College for a year, he joined the army, serving in Korea. He received a BA in English from the University of Tulsa in 1959 and an MA in 1962. Berrigan moved to New York in the early 1960s where he edited and published C Magazine and C Press Books.

Berrigan taught at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and was writer-in-residence/visiting poet at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he met the Alice Notley, whom he married in 1972. They spent time in New York, Buffalo, Chicago, and England before settling in New York.

Berrigan also taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, and the Naropa Institute. In 1979 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the author of more than 20 books, including The Sonnets (1964), Bean Spasms (with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard) (1967), Poems, In Brief (1971), Red Wagon (1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988).