Di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. Her official online biography notes that she was “a second generation American of Italian descent” and that “Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman.” Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published in 1958 by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones’ Totem Press.

She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear. In 1961 she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for publishing two poems in The Floating Bear. According to di Prima, police persistently harassed her due to the nature of her poetry. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community.

In the late 1960s, di Prima moved permanently to California. There, she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism, and alchemy. In 1966, she signed a vow of tax resistance to the Vietnam War. She also published her major work, the long poem Loba, in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. From the 1960s on she worked as a photographer and a collage artist, and in the last decade or so of her life she took up watercolor painting.

From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman (co-founders of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others.

From 1980 to 1987, di Prima taught Hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry, in a short-lived but significant Masters-in-Poetics program at New College of California, which she established together with poets Robert Duncan and David Meltzer. She has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was one of the co-founders of San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA), where she taught Western spiritual traditions from 1983 to 1992.

Di Prima was known for her activism, having been exposed early on to political consciousness by her grandfather, Domenico, as detailed in her memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman; she also discusses this in a 2001 interview with David Hadbawnik. In her memoir, di Prima describes seeing her grandfather speak at a rally in the park, writing “I am proud of him, and afraid, but mostly amazed. His words have awakened my full acknowledgment, consent. I hear what he says as truth, and it seems I have always known it. I feel old, self-contained, passionate with the pure passion of a child.” Moments such as these sparked a dedication to social activism, especially as it concerned women’s rights, that persisted throughout di Prima’s life.

In 2009, di Prima became San Francisco’s poet laureate.

Di Prima died on October 25, 2020. She was 86 years old.