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Ed Sanders United States of America    PWF 2008, 2005

Ed Sanders was born in 1939 in Kansas City. After graduating from high school Sanders and his friend said goodbye to everyone: “We are going to New York to become poets”.

In New York City’s Greenwich Village he hung out on the edge of the Beat scene preparing himself unwittingly for the important role that he would assume in American literary life: providing a bridge between Beatnik and Hippie generations. A brief jail stay for his 1961 protest of nuclear proliferation yielded Sanders‘ first major Poem from Jail. Sanders also became well-known as a founder and a leading force of a satirical, literate-tone folk rock band the Fugs which performed at Vietnam War protests nationwide.

In 1988 he won American Award for Literature for his collection of poems Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985. His journalism has appeared in The Village Voice and The New York Times, and he lectures widely on Investigative Poetry. He published a book in 2014, called A Book of Glyphs. Another popular book he has published was The Family, in 1990.

Ed Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York.