[2] At the age of sixteen, inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, she went with a friend to the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, where they met Gregory Corso; in 1960, after graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she moved in with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky.
In December 1962, she married the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega [fr] in Israel and moved with him to Paris, where she collected money for street musicians and modeled at the École des Beaux-Arts.
[1][2] After Vega's sudden death in Ibiza in 1965, she returned to the United States and moved to California.
[1] In the 1970s and 1980s Vega traveled widely, trekking in the Himalayas and living in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, including two years as a hermit on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian-Peruvian border, where she completed Journal of a Hermit (1974) and Morning Passage (1976).
[3] Vega taught in schools in English and Spanish through arts in education programs including Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Poets in the Schools, Arts/Genesis, and New York City Ballet,[3] and beginning in the mid-1970s in prisons through Incisions/Arts, becoming its director in 1987, and later through the Bard Prison Initiative run by Bard College.