Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman is an internationally known poet, performer, professor, editor, with strong personal links to the New York School, the Beat Literary Movement, and the experimental strands of the New American Poetry. She has also extended performance to new dimensions with her "modal structures" as in the celebrated "Pieces of An Hour" (for John Cage). She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a program she co-founded with poet Allen Ginsberg in 1974. She is the author of over 30 books including, most recently, Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos, (Coffee House Press, 2001) Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Poets, 2000) the 20th anniversary edition of Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights Books), Iovis: All Is Full of Jove: Books I & II (Coffee House Press), Kill or Cure (Penguin Poets). She is also the editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications), and co-editor of Disembodied Poetics: Annals of The Jack Kerouac School (University of New Mexico Press). She was an Assistant Director (1966-1968) and the Director of the St. Mark s Poetry Project (1968-1978) and edited The World Anthology, Another World and Out of This World, compendiums of writing from The Poetry Project which included writings by three generations of cutting edge, and culturally active poets and writers.

Anne Waldman has also been on the guest faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and advisor to the Prazska Skola Projekt in Prague. She was the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in Fall of 1999 (a decade-old program she helped develop) and has taught classes and workshops in literature, creative writing and performance for a number of other projects, universities, schools in the US and abroad. She has been a guest at recent festivals in London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. She has had books published in Italian and German and work translated into French, Turkish, and Czech. She is featured on the video, "Battle of The Bards" (Lannan Foundation) and "Eye In All Heads" (Phoebus Productions/Boulder). She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation and is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. She has recently released a CD of her poetry and songs co-produced with Steven Taylor entitled "Alchemical Elegy: Selected Songs & Writings" and co-edited with Lewis Warsh The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001), an anthology of work from Angel Hair Magazine and Books, an alternative press of the 60s and 70s. Also, she has collaborated and performed with jazz musician Steve Lacy, collaborated with composer and musician Steven Taylor, musician Mark Miller, dancers Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Lisa Kraut, and has worked collaboratively with artists Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Red Grooms, Susan Rothenberg, Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, among others.

She has been the Director of the Naropa Abroad Program to Bali, Indonesia and makes regular visits to that part of the world. She is a two-time winner of the International Poetry Championship Bout in Taos, New Mexico. She traveled with Bob Dylan s Rolling Thunder revue in the 1970s, and performed at Town Hall in New York City in a Tribute for Bob Dylan s 60th birthday. She was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria, Fall 2001, and a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in 2002. Ms. Waldman s archives reside at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan which hosted a symposium and exhibit from that collection in March of 2002. Recent books include Zombie Dawn (with Tom Clark, Skanky Possum, 2003), and DARK ARCANA, Afterimage or Glow (Heavenbone Press), a journal kept in Vietnam in 2000, with cover and photographs by Patti Smith, 2003. A compact disk: Battery: Live At Naropa 1974-2001 has just been realeased. Anne Waldman founded the activist Coalition Poetry is News with Ammiel Alcalay and has been active in recent anti-war protest including the Poems Not Fit For the White House Event at Lincoln Center, and the VERSUS reading at the Paul Cooper Gallery in New York. Recent Conferences and festivals: Berlin, Rome, Quebec, Luxembourg, Prague, Vienna.