[1] She attended academically elite Hunter College High School where she became part of a small group of friends including classmate Audre Lorde who formed a sort of Dead Poets Society calling themselves "the Branded".

They cut class to roam the city, hanging out in bookstores, sharing their own poetry and holding séances for dead poets.

[4] She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City, and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently.

On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear.

[8] At The Band's famous Last Waltz concert in 1976, she read aloud from Revolutionary Letters and the one-line poem "Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife".

[citation needed] From 1980 to 1987, di Prima taught Hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry, in a short-lived but significant Masters-in-Poetics program at New College of California,[12] which she established together with poets Robert Duncan and David Meltzer.

She was one of the co-founders of San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA), where she taught Western spiritual traditions from 1983 to 1992.

[1] Di Prima was known for her activism, having been exposed early on to political consciousness by her grandfather, Domenico, as detailed in her memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman; she also discusses this in a 2001 interview with David Hadbawnik.