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Anne Waldman United States of America    PWF 2009

Poet and cultural activist Anne Waldman was born in 1945 in Millville, New Jersey. An inheritor of The Black Mountain, Beat and New York School of poetry—Waldman has helped create and nature poetry zones throughout the United States, directing the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery for over a decade and co-founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in 1974. Ginsberg called her—his “spiritual wife”.

A master of poetry and poetic performance, Waldman examines the prevalence of patriarchal dominance and the masculine spirit in Western culture. Her Fast Speaking Woman—a thirty page “list chant” inspired by Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina—is what Waldman calls “every woman’s song”. The work applauds female energy—and relies on the power of the spoken word.

An advocate for feminist, environmental and human rights issues, Waldman has published more than forty books of poetry, which include:  Helping the Dreamer, Marriage: A Sentence, In the Room of Never Grieve, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, Outrider, Red Noir, Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, and Manatee/Humanity.

“No event is isolated—no force is ever spent.”

Anne Waldman divides her time between New York and Boulder, Colorado.