Charles Potts
Charles Potts is an American counter-culture poet. He is sometimes referred to as a projectivist poet and was mentored by Edward Dorn. Raised in rural Mackay, Idaho, Potts left Pocatello, Idaho and Idaho State University in the mid 60s and set out for Seattle, Mexico, and ultimately the location where he rose to literary prominence: the counter cultural hotbed of Berkeley, California.
There, he founded the Litmus literary magazine and the Litmus publishing company, which published his friend Charles Bukowski's book "Poems written before jumping out of an 8 story window". Potts' gives an account of his time as a revolutionary hippie in the Berkeley poetry scene, and a psychotic breakdown he suffered there, in his two-part memoir Valga Krusa.
In the 80s Potts moved to Walla Walla, Washington where he later founded The Temple bookstore, Tsunami publishing, and The Temple Literary Magazine.
Potts' biography is also of record in the Marquis publications, Who's Who in America, 1977, Who's Who in the West, 1996, Who's Who in the World, 1996, and Who's Who in Finance and Industry, 1998.
Potts, better known as a poet, also won Manuscript's International's First Place Novel Award for Creative Excellence in 1991, for the Novel Loading Las Vegas. He was given a Distinguished Professional Achievement Award by the Alumni Association and the College of Arts and Sciences at Idaho State University in 1994. He has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington Poets Association in 2008.
Potts' collected works, letters, and publishing materials were housed in the archives of Utah State University's Merrill-Cazier Library in Logan, Utah in 2011.
