CAROL BERGÉ (1928 - 2006) Carol was born in Manhattan and attended the Fieldston School there and schools in Westchester and Florida. She attended New York University and Columbia, studying social sciences and fine arts for almost a decade, dismissing the option of a degree program. During the years 1946-1955, while attending college, she worked for well-known publishing and advertising firms. At age 14 she bought a Longwy bowl in an antiques shop for $10; that year, her first poem was published. These passions intertwined throughout her life… In 1960, she co-opened Five Cities Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village; next door was Tenth Street Coffeehouse, where the Light Years poets began their readings. A stay at the Chelsea in 1969 put her in contact with Morrison and Joplin. In 1955 she married Jack; a son, Peter, was born in 1956. In 1970, in Woodstock, New York, she began a teaching career; the first of eight rehab projects, she updated a house of over a century old and in need. During the 1970s she taught writing and multimedia by invitation at 16 universities, "no degrees," keeping her antiques-filled farmhouse in Woodstock. Periodicals include Abraxas, Amelia, Aphra, Atta Boy, Back Roads, Blue Beat, Burning Deck, Chelsea, Cloud Chamber, Community, Confrontation, Connections, Crazy Horse, Crosscurrents, Dialog, Dynamite Solid, East Side Review, The Falcon, Fireweed, For Now, Gallery Works, Grist, etc. From 1970-1984, she published/edited the hooplahed literary magazine CENTER. A second stay at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan got her into the crowd at Studio 54, ca. 1981. After a divorce, she won custoday of her son in 1960 and traveled with Makoto Oda in Europe. Her poetry was widely published; she was part of the Fluxus multimedia actvities; she lists her early influences as Malinowski, Benedict, Mead, Kluckhohn, Freuchen, Twain, Dickens, Sheakespeare, the Brontes, DuMaurier, Poe (the stories), Conan Doyle, Saki, Chaucer and Browning.Finally settling in Santa Fe, she started Blue Gate Art & Antiques, selling retro merch through the 1990s, gaining weight and giving up the party; she wanted only a cigaret, many of which eventually killed her with emphysema; she engaged a lot of polutants during her life. Among her contemporaries she lists as authors and respects Donald Phelps, Fielding Dawson, John Cage, Amiri Baraka, Jackson Mac Low and Howard McCord. Always involved in explorations of new forms and innovative writing, she moved from genre to genre and location to location. Ms. Bergé married twice and raised a son as a single mother. From middle-class bobby-soxer in the 1940s to her counterculture image of the 1960s, to entrepreneurial antiquer of the 1980s and then tethered to an oxygen tank and housebound during her last years... she took risks and lived by her own design. Her body of work consists of 22 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry; an Internet search should detail why she was awarded NEA and NYSCA fellowships for her contribution to literature and the arts.