Janet Zandy

Her most well-known poem is "White Trash: An Autobiography" which was published in Calling Home: Working Class Women's Writings, An Anthology (edited by Janet Zandy; Rutgers University Press).In the first section "1948: Dysentery in the First World" her family is living in a trailer in Salinas when her younger brother gets dysentery and is taken to the local hospital: "After two weeks the doctors told my mother/to take him home to die. /Instead she took him to a university medical center. /He was given antibiotics and lived."Also, her father was a truck driver with narcolepsy, a disease that caused him to lose jobs, so the family was constantly moving around California until they settled in Fremont, in a blue-collar tract.

Carol herself was a diabetic since she was a teenager.After a short-lived marriage in Marin which resulted in two children, she moved to San Francisco, worked full-time as a secretary at UC San Francisco Medical Center while attending school at San Francisco State for six years to complete both her B.A. and M.A. "It was hard," she said."I never want to do it again.I was exhausted."She devoted her weekends and summers to her two daughters who lived with their father in Marin.

In high school she was a voracious reader, devouring Dreiser, Steinbeck, Hemingway, James Farrell, Brecht, Clifford Odets.In junior college she acted in Theater of the Absurd plays, growing to like Beckett, Ionesco, and Edward Albee.On her own she read Vallejo, Breton, and Neruda.She especially liked Breton's idea about the imagination.The imagination is central to her poetry and her life.She survived the numbing jobs she worked her whole life partially by using her imagination.

For a short time she was on welfare, producing the enraged poem "Welfare Rights" how men, on finding out she was on welfare, would offer her money for sex.When she graduated with her M.A., she said, "There were no full-time teaching jobs in public school system or junior college system in San Francisco.They laid off tons of people in the late '70s."

With diabetes, two children to help support, and no family back-up she couldn't get hired as an adjunct professor without benefits or job security, so she kept working as a secretary in the medical school at UC San Francisco, ran the poetry reading series at the Coffee Gallery (now the Lost and Found) in North Beach, co-founded the fiction magazine Real Fiction.She assisted her husband David Joseph in editing his pioneering magazine Working Classics featuring working class literature in the late 1980s.She was active in her union AFSCME, holding office in her local and as a delegate SF Labor Council.