David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books including William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being; The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats; Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions; R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self; Jazz, Counterculture, and the Sacred; and biographies of Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller. He has also edited five volumes of uncollected prose by Bukowski for City Lights. Calonne has lectured internationally and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. He presently teaches at Eastern Michigan University.