Bobbie Louise Hawkins was raised in west Texas, studied art in London, taught in missionary schools in British Honduras, attended a Jesuit university in Tokyo while acting on radio and stage, and had her first one-woman show of paintings and collages at Gotham Book Mart in New York in 1974.

She has illustrated several books from Black Sparrow Press, which in 1973 published her Own Your Bod~ That same year Arif Press published her 15 Poems. Two of Hawkins’ books appeared early in 1977–Frenchy and Cuban Pete (Tombouctou) and Back to Texas (Bearhug), and in 1979 she was one of 100 poets from eleven countries attending the "One World Poetry" festival in Amsterdam and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins wrote a one-hour play for PBS called "Talk" in 1980.

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