Aimée Joan Grunberger was born in Stamford,Connecticut in 1953. She attended Stamford Public Schools and as a teenage hippie she often sat in a tree reading or writing poems. Aimee absorbed the influences of writers W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marcel Proust, Charles Bukowski and Walt Whitman. She was equally attracted to films made by Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavedes, Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock, and film critics Pauline Kael and Rudolf Arnheim.

She started a student run radio program on WSTC called “Here, There and Everywhere” and wrote for an anti-war student newspaper called “The Paper”. Along with her Brother and friends, she held all-night candlelight vigils protesting the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

She attended Brown University majoring both English and Comparative Literature. After college she stayed in Providence for seventeen more years. She was a chef at a vegetarian restaurant called “Juliennes”, wrote film reviews for “Cable Car Cinema” and worked as a social skills therapist with schizophrenic Vietnam War Veterans. Her collection “Ten Degrees Cooler Inside” was inspired by her time as a psychotherapist at Providence Veterans Hospital.

Aimee married her college love Michael Holleran and they had twin boys together in 1985. Max Holleran has a PhD from New York University and is currently a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Melbourne. Sam Holleran is a graduate of Cooper Union and works as interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator at Ellery Studio, a think and do tank in Berlin.

 The family moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1990 where Aimee received her a Master’s from Naropa Institute in Creative Writing. Aimee went on to teach at Naropa, where there would later be an academic scholarship awarded in her name.  

Aimée was a two-time Walt Whitman Award Finalist. “Goodbye to All That” was published in the 1996 anthology
“American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century.” Her poems the “The Old Road” and “Swimming Upstream” were published in Poetry Comes Up Where It Can from the Amicus Journal 1990-2000.

At the age of thirty-nine Aimee was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Her twins were seven. She never had a good day after but continued to write leaving us over five-hundred unpublished poems.