Philomene Long

Philomene Long was born in Greenwich Village, and was a poet from age eight. She had two principal influences in common with Jack Kerouac: St. Theresa and Huckleberry Finn. At the age of eighteen she entered a convent but after five years behind cloister walls she fled in the middle of the night and migrated to Venice, California where she has lived since the late 1960s. She met beat poet John Thomas in 1968 and married him in 1983; John died in 2002. She was installed as Poet Laureate of Venice in September 2005.