He has lived in Berkeley, California, since 1971 with his wife Jill, a librarian, and has worked as a professional woodworker at Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop since 1974.

Involved in the cooperative movement in the Bay Area since the early 1970s, he was a founding member of the InterCollective and an editor of the Collective Directory (1981–85).

Memories of Drop City (2007) is his memoir of the 1960s communal movement and the first "hippie" commune, in Colorado, where he lived between 1966 and 1969, which Ishmael Reed called "highly crafted and brilliant," and Al Young described as "compelling."

An anthology of his poetry translated into Spanish by Rei Berroa was scheduled to be published by Editorial el Perro y la Rana (Caracas) in 2011.

Curl's collected poems, Revolutionary Alchemy, with a foreword by San Francisco poet laureate Jack Hirschman, came out that same year.