Anne Waldman '58

A writer, editor, teacher, performer, scholar, and activist who has lectured, read and performed her own work all over the world, and has collaborated with musicians, composers, visual artists, filmmakers and dancers.

Deemed a “countercultural giant” by Publishers Weekly, Anne Waldman is one of the best known and celebratedfemale poets not only in the United States, but around the world.

Anne co-founded The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village and served as the program’s artistic director its first ten years. Later, along with Allen Ginsberg, she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, where she is Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program.

A prominent figure of the Beat Generation and New York School, she has had close ties with poets such as William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Ted Berrigan,and Barbara Guest, and she was a poet in residence during Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue Tour.

Anne helped to create and nurture the “Outrider” experimental poetry community. She has published over 40 books of poetry and has edited numerous anthologies. Her poetry has garnered numerous awards, including The Dylan Thomas Memorial Award, The Poets Foundation Award, The National Literary Anthology Award, and The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. In 2009, her play “Red Noir” ran for two and a half months off Broadway. In 2012 she received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry for her multi-volume “The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment.” In 2011, Anne was named Chancellor at The American Academy of Poets.

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