Adam Cornford

Adam Francis Cornford was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of Christopher Cornford and a lineal descendant of naturalist Charles Darwin. Cornford moved to California in 1969. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with (and was first published by) kayak editor George Hitchcock; and San Francisco State University, where his mentor was the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis. Among his books are four collections of poetry: Shooting Scripts (Black Stone Press, 1978); Animations (City Lights Books, 1988), Decision Forest (Pantograph Press, 1997), and Lalia (Chax Press, 2021). For 21 years, Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco. In 2015, Cornford provided the text for a collaboration with Jonathan Gerken and printer and bookmaker Peter Rutledge Koch, Liber Ignis (2015), a serial documentary poem on the history of copper mining and smelting in Butte, Montana that accompanies historical photographs.