Alta was born in Reno, Nevada and lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a poet, prose writer, and publisher who gained fame for the first woman-owned and feminist Shameless Hussy Press in the 1968 in Oakland, CA that continued until 1989 - noted for publishing the first edition of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. Alta’s own collection, Shameless Hussy, received an American Book Award. She has also authored Freedom's in Sight, Letters to Women, burn this & memorize yourself, song of the wife song of the mistress, No Visible Means of Support, i am not a practicing angel, and others. She was recently invited by Marge Piercy to the 2014 Women’s Liberation Confreence in Boston to read her work and to discuss the explosion of women’s poetry in the 1960s. The poems presented here reflect her signature earlier work and her current reflections coping with illness. Her work is archived at OAC, Online Archive of California.