Hawkins was born in Abilene in west Texas, to a teenage mother. She was raised by her mother Nora Hall and her stepfather Harold Hall, with guidance from her grandmother, who would tell her tales of her family. She spent much of her childhood reading, believing "that the world I read in books existed out there." The family would later move to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she would ultimately meet and marry her first husband, Olaf Hoek, a Danish architect. The couple would seen move to England where she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Arts of the University CollegeLondon for one year.They would later move to British Honduras, now Belize, where she taught in missionary schools. She would also attend Sophia University. The two would later divorce after having two daughters. She returned to New Mexico where she met Robert Creeley, a teacher who would later become a famous poet in his own right. The two soon married. It was Creeley's position that any wife of a poet would want to write themselves, but derided Hawkins' attempts, to the point that she was "too married, too old, and too late" for her do so. "I was fighting for the right to write badly until I got better." Her first book Own Your Body came out in 1973. Hawkins and Creeley would separate in 1975, after having two more daughters. Hawkins not only wrote, but she was an accomplished artist. Her first one-woman show consisting of paintings and collages was at the Gotham Book Mart in 1974. Many of her artworks would grace the covers her books. In 1978, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg hired her to teach fiction writing workshops and courses unliterary studies at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute at Boulder, Colorado. It is now called Naropa University. She remained at the school until her retirement in 2010. After retiring, she continued to offer readings and teach for Naropa's Summer Writing Program. She wrote a one-hour play for PBS called "Talk" in 1980. She released two CD’s, Live at the Great American Music Hall and Jaded Love. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City. She would publish nineteen books and pieces Inver fifty anthologies and journals. As part of the Beat Movement, many of her poems feature unconventional construction. 'What's to save his life?" reads more like a brief prose passage, rather than a poem, but it still carrys weight and emotion. Many her poems are short, such as "trouble and hope," which has only three lines, but showcases the random nature of life, both the good and the bad. Her ethic might be best explained in another work of hers, "in time I'll do what":— She was survived by her two daughters from her second marriage, one daughter from her first marriage, and two grandchildren.
Bobbie Louise Hawkins' Almost Everything is just that. It leaves out her scattered poems and any direct reference to her two unhappy marriages and the children they produced. What remains, two collections of short prose pieces and nine new stories, run a mere 172 pages -- the condensed version of a life punctuated, as Tillie Olsen might put it, by "silences." So when Hawkins speaks, it's that much more pungent.
