In 1994, Edward Dorn brought Berlin to the University of Colorado, and she spent the next six years in Boulder as a visiting writer and, ultimately, associate professor. She became a remarkably popular and beloved teacher, and in just her second year, won the university’s award for teaching excellence.
During the Boulder years she thrived in a close community that included Dorn and his wife, Jennie, Anselm Hollo, and her old pal Bobbie Louise Hawkins. The poet Kenward Elmslie became, like the prose writer Stephen Emerson, a fast friend.
Her health failing (the scoliosis had led to a punctured lung, and by the mid-1990s she was never without an oxygen tank), she retired in 2000 and the next year moved to Los Angeles at the encouragement of her sons, several of whom were there. She fought a successful battle against cancer, but died in 2004, in Marina del Rey.
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Notes
* In Lucia’s prose, punctuation is often unorthodox and sometimes inconsistent. Speed is one of the reasons. She abhors the comma that results in a pause that would not be heard in speech, or that produces an undesired slowing of any kind. In other cases, the eschewal of a comma will result in a certain hectic quality that promotes momentum. For the most part, we have avoided sanitizing her punctuation. The same goes for a few grammatical quirks rooted in vernacular and a characteristic hurry-up shorthand.