Jessica Hagedorn

writer

A novelist, poet, multimedia and performance artist. Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn had been in the United States for only three years (after moving from the Philippines at age thirteen) when her poems caught the attention of Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth, a San Francisco-based artist, encouraged her to hone her writing and edited the book that first featured her poetry, *Four Young Women* (1973). Forged in the heat of the early 1970s ethnic revival, her early forays into poetry, playwriting, and short fiction employed the psychedelic and rebellious idioms particular to that period. Anthologized in *Mountain Moving Day* (1973), *Third World Women* (1973), and *Time to Greez!* (1975), she soon produced her first collection of poetry and fiction, *Dangerous Music *(1975).