Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman

Fellow: Awarded 2013
Field of Study: Poetry

Competition: US & Canada

Naropa University

Anne Waldman grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, and began writing at an early age. Poetry collections over the years have included the long chant poem Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights), the selected volumes Helping the Dreamer and In the Room of Never Grieve (both from Coffee House Press), and four long hybrid poems from Penguin Poets, including the most recent Gossamurmur (2013). Other book-length poems include Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity. Her thousand-page three-volume feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011) won the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in 2012.  Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Finnish, and Czech. She is a former Director of The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery and co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University  (the first Buddhist-inspired university in the west) with Allen Ginsberg in 1974 where she continues to direct its innovative Summer Writing Program. She is also the editor of numerous anthologies including Another World, Out of This World, The Beat Book, Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action and Beats at Naropa and the forthcoming Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics. She has collaborated with many artists, musicians, dancers, and filmmakers, including Richard Tuttle, Pat Steir, Donna Dennis, Ambrose Bye, Douglas Dunn, Ed Bowes, and  Living Theatre Director Judith Malina. She is currently writing a libretto for composer David T. Little for the opera-theatre production Artaud in the Black Lodge. She is the winner of the Shelley Memorial Award and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Allen Ginsberg referred to Waldman as his “spiritual wife” and she continues a legacy of open-form investigative poetics, performance, and cultural activism around the globe. She has recently worked in Morocco and India, lecturing, teaching, and reading her poetry. She makes her home in Boulder, Colorado, and New York City. Her extensive literary archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Profile photograph by Greg Fuchs.

For more information, visit http://www.fastspeakingmusic.com/

 

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