Anne Waldman

Acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Waldman is the author of more than forty books, including Fast Speaking Woman, Vow to Poetry, and several selected editions of poetry, including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure, and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence; Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Manatee/Humanity; and the monumental antiwar feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. Waldman was a founder and director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church in-the-Bowery and cofounded, with Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Waldman is a distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa; she also has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria; has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice; was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in New York City; and is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, in addition to recently being appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Houtian Poetry Prize from China. Recent books include Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House, 2016) and the forthcoming Trickster Feminine (Penguin Poets, 2018). Waldman was the keynote speaker at the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2017 and curated the Poesie en Voz Alta Festival in Mexico City in 2017. She regularly performs with her family band, Fast Speaking Music. Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.