Anne Waldman

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.