David Abraham Antin was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 1, 1932. He received a bachelor's degree in English and speech from the City College of New York in 1955 and a master's degree in linguistics at New York University in 1966. After working as an educational curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, he taught in the department of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 to 1972, he directed the university's Mandeville Art Gallery.
He was also a poet who created a new performance style called talk poems, which was part lecture, part stand-up routine, and part Homeric recitation. After editing his tape-recorded performances, he wrote the poems down. He published several collections of poetry during his lifetime including Talking, Talking at the Boundaries, and What It Means to Be Avant-Garde. A collections of his articles on art, Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966-2005, were published in 2011. He died from complications of a broken neck that he suffered in a fall on October 11, 2016 at the age of 84.
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