Laura Ulewicz was born in Detroit to working-class Polish immigrants. In 1950 she moved to San Francisco, where she was involved with the Beat literary scene. She had an intense love affair with Jack Gilbert, who dedicated his first book to her, and she ran the I-Thou coffee house on Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a time, and allegedly escaped. Her first and only book, The Inheritance, was published in 1967; she published sparingly during her lifetime, although her work appeared in literary magazines in the US and the UK, in anthologies such as Richard Peabodys A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation (1997), and as broadsides in the Bay Area during the 1960s. She was friends with many Beat poets, but she didnt identify her own poetics with the scene. Recalling Ulewicz, Erica Goss has remarked, Lauras role as a member of the Beat movement was not limited to that of dispassionate observer, but many of her poems function as snapshots of that era, taken, it seems, when her subjects were least aware of being photographed.