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=                            Gerd_Stern_                             =
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                            Introduction
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Gerd Jacob Stern (October 12, 1928 - February 17, 2025) was an
American poet and artist.


                      Early life and education
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Born Gerd Jacob Stern in the Saar region, then under a League of
Nations mandate, he emigrated with his family to New York City in 1935
following the Saar's incorporation into Nazi Germany. His father, Otto
Stern, operated a cheese import business.

Stern attended the Bronx High School of Science and City College of
New York briefly, initially intending to study zoology. He later spent
a short period at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he
studied poetry and was influenced by Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.
It was through Cage that Stern encountered Marshall McLuhan's
theories, reading an early manuscript of McLuhan's influential work
'Understanding Media'.


                               Career
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In the late 1940s through the 1960s, Stern divided his time between
New York City and California's Bay Area, actively participating in
countercultural circles. He met Allen Ginsberg at the Columbia
Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, assisted in the publication of
William Burroughs's pseudonymous first novel 'Junkie' at Ace Books,
and managed Maya Angelou during her early career as a cabaret
performer. He also wrote travel articles for 'Playboy' and contributed
to the establishment of Berkeley's listener-supported radio station,
KPFA-FM.

In the 1940s, he became friends with poets John Hoffman and Philip
Lamantia. He told Ron Martinetti of American Legends website about
Lamantia: "We had similar feelings about the world and were both pot
smokers. Plus there was the Jewish Italian thing, the natural affinity
there is for each other. Philip was a very engaging guy. He didn’t
harp on his background, the mythology of his connection to [Andre]
Breton. He was not impressed. Others were."

In the early 1960s, Stern co-founded the artists' collective USCO ("US
Company") with Michael Callahan and Stephen Durkee. Members of USCO
included photographer and weaver Judi Stern (his third wife),
filmmaker Jud Yalkut, and Stewart Brand, who later created the Whole
Earth Catalog.

By the 1970s, as the popularity of multimedia art declined, Stern
established another collective, Intermedia Systems Corporation, and
transitioned into academia, teaching at Harvard University and the
University of California, Santa Cruz.

In the early 2000s, Stern's work received renewed attention with
retrospectives at institutions such as Anthology Film Archives and the
Whitney Museum of American Art, and his collaborative media works were
exhibited in Europe and the United States.

Late in life, he contributed to cultural projects such as "LSD: The
Opera," co-compiled a poetry anthology focused on Jewish holidays, and
participated in monthly poetry-science discussions in New York City.
Stern also led the family cheese-import business in New Jersey for a
period and served as president of the American Cheese Society.


                           Personal life
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Stern was married four times, with each marriage ending in divorce. He
had multiple children and grandchildren, although three sons and one
grandson predeceased him.


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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Stern_