Neeli Cherkovski (July 1, 1945–March 19, 2024) was an American poet and memoirist. Born Nelson Cherry, he grew up in Los Angeles, where as a teen he began publishing poems and was befriended by Charles Bukowski, with whom he edited the poetry zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. In the 1970s, he was a political consultant in the Riverside area, moving to San Francisco in 1974 to work for then-State Senator George Moscone. In San Francisco, he came out as gay, reclaimed his family's historical name, and became a major figure in the North Beach literary community. In the 1990s, he became a writer-in-residence at the New College of California, teaching literature and philosophy there until it closed in 2008.

The author of numerous collections of poetry, Cherkovski also wrote the first biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1979) and Charles Bukowski (1991), as well as Whitman's Wild Children (1988), a collection of his memoirs of 12 Beat Generation poets. He co-edited books, including Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972) and The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2019). His collection Leaning Against Time won the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. In 2017, he was awarded the Jack Mueller Poetry Prize by Lithic Press, which published his 400-page, career-spanning Selected Poems 1959–2022 in 2024. Cherkovski is also the subject of the documentary film, It's Nice to Be with You Always (2020). He lived in San Francisco with Jesse Cabrera, his partner of 40 years.

photo by Kyle Harvey