Her father and her brother, Bill, were both blind; when Alta was 12, the family moved to Castro Valley, Calif., so her brother could attend a school for the blind. Alta studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to volunteer as a teacher in the Black communities of Prince Edward County, Va., about 70 miles west of Richmond, where schools had been closed in a rebuke to integration efforts. She returned to Berkeley not long after.

After Alta’s marriage to Danny Bosserman, an aspiring actor, ended in divorce in the late 1960s, she lived for a time with the poet John Oliver Simon. She married Daniel Skarry, a classical guitarist who worked in a gas station and helped with Shameless Hussy’s distribution, in the early 1970s; they divorced a decade later. In addition to her daughter Kia, she is survived by another daughter, Lorelei Bosserman, and a granddaughter.

Before it closed in 1989, Shameless Hussy published some 50 titles, including the 19th-century French novelist George Sand’s “The Haunted Pool,” which had been out of print; Calamity Jane’s letters to her daughter; and three volumes of Alta’s own poetry. By the mid-1970s, Shameless Hussy’s printing press had moved out of Alta’s garage, and the books were being published, now with spines, by a company in the Midwest.

From 2006 to 2008, Alta ran her own gallery in Berkeley, showcasing works by local artists.

“My own poetry was only shocking because it hadn’t been said a million times,” she said in the oral history. “Now it’s been said a million times. If you read my poems now, they’d say, ‘What’s the big deal?’”