Bill Mayer was born and raised in Los Angeles. He received his BA and MA from San Francisco State University, studying with Jack Gilbert, Stan Rice, William Dickey and Nanos Valaoritis. In the late '60s, he was invited to join a poetry workshop with Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Larry Felson, George Stanley, Bill Anderson, Wilbur Wood, and others. The workshop persists to this day with some of its original participants. Paroikia Press has begun a series of chapbooks of its members, both past and present ( Larry Felson's Salt and Silver, and Mayer's The Deleted Family, are the first in the series) and will publish an anthology of its nearly 40 years of existence.
Mr. Mayer has published three books of poetry (including the above mentioned chapbook) and has work in a number of magazines: Caterpiller, Ironwood, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Montana Gothic, Five Fingers Review, Red Rock Review, Paris Atlantic, and Poetry Flash, among others. He has recently appeared in an anthology of American poets who have lived in Greece, Kindled Terraces, edited by Donald Schofield. A fourth book is in preparation.
He has traveled widely, having spent extended time in Vermont, England, Greece, Hawaii, Monterey, Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. He is also a professional photographer (working with Tony Keppelman on Hummingbirds, a photographic essay published by Little-Brown) and importer of German and Austrian wines. He is married to Jane McKinne, professor of Art History at California College of the Arts, and lives with her in Berkeley, California.
A few quotes about Bill Mayer's poems:
I find his poems intelligent, personal, and deeply courageous, a welcome support and contribution to the journey we all ultimately travel - that of finding ourselves at the deepest level.
-Tony Keppelman
Bill Mayer's poems are important, brave and religious in the deepest way because they ask relentlessly what is truly of consequence.
-Steve Rood
Like many poets of the Greek Anthology or the Book of Songs, Mayer is a wanderer. But he is no exile. Rather he is a journeyer who searches not for discovery but for that something else sensed only through absence and longing.
-Peter Weltner
I think Bill Mayer's writing is essentially landscape poetry - not the kind found in representational art, but a landscape formed of feeling.
-Bob Stephens
