In 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States, a Mecca for millions. His Coney Island of the Mind is one of the best-selling volumes of poetry by any living American poet. Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation. Nancy Peters is an American writer as well as the former editor-in-chief of City Lights Books, which she co-owns with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

"He has a gift for helping you hear what needs to be said... His high points are the poems that you wish you could listen to in a car, on a long coastal highway with the windows rolled down."