Anne Waldman has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity, and Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), a feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. She has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly for her ethos as a poetic investigator and cultural activist, and was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, 2015. She has also been at the forefront many decades in creating educational communities and has focused on the necessity of archival practices to insure the memory of some of the 20th and 21st century’s most precious literary histories and oral recordings. She was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and its Director a number of years and then went on to found The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg in 1974. She has continued to work at Naropa as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program. She is the editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats At Naropa and most recently, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics. Her most recent poetry collections are Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born (Coffee House Press, 2016) and Trickster Feminism (Penguin 2018).
She is a recipient of The Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. She has collaborated with a number of artists and performers and dancers, including Judith Malina of The Living Theatre choreographer Douglas Dunn, painters Pat Steir and Richard Tuttle, performance artist and singer Meredith Monk, and her son, musician Ambrose Bye, and nephew Devin Brahja Waldman with whom she founded the Fast Speaking Music recording label. She makes her home in New York City and Boulder, Colorado and reads, performs and lectures all over the world. Waldman has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice, and a Lannan resideny in Marfa, Texas. She has worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and at the Women’s Christian College in Tokyo. She has presented her work at conferences and festivals around the world, most recently in Brussels, Vienna, Slovakia, Wuhan, Beijing, Berlin. Nicaragua, Prague, Paris, Nantes, Kerala, Mumbai, Kolkata, Marrakech, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Hangzhou. She worked for the State Department lecturing at Muslim colleges in Kerala, and has worked teaching poetry to Berber School children in Marrakech, Morocco for the Tamaas Foundation. She recently performed and presented the keynote address at The Jaipur Literature Festival in India, 2017, and curated a poetry-in-performance Voz Alta 17 festival at the Casa del Lago in Mexico City. Her work has been translated into numerous languages. Recent album: Untethered, 2017, Fast Speaking Music. Allen Ginsberg referred to Waldman as his “spiritual wife”. annewaldman.org
