Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman has been an active member of what she terms the “outrider” experimental poetry community for more than four decades. She has written more than 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (2001), published by City Lights Books; Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2022); and Vow to Poetry (Coffee House Press, 2001). She is the author of selected poetry editions, including Helping the Dreamer (Coffee House Press, 1989), Kill or Cure (Penguin Books, 1994), and In the Room of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press, 2008). 

Waldman has written on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Books, 2000); Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Books, 2004); Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009); and Gossamurmur (Penguin Books, 2013). Her anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment—a 25-year project—won the PEN Center Award for Poetry. Other books include Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha: Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha (translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman, Shambhala Publications, 2020), Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018), Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen, 2017), and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press, 2016), which, in Lyn Hejinian’s words, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge.”

Waldman is one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and a cofounder with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the Western Hemisphere. Waldman is a distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary and oral archives and curate the celebrated Summer Writing Program. Waldman’s edited volume New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat Books, 2022), edited with Emma Gomis, is a collection of lectures transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program that represents a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. Other collections she has edited based on the holdings of the Kerouac School include the following published by Coffee House Press: Civil Disobediences (2004), Beats at Naropa (2009), and Cross Worlds:Transcultural Poetics (2014). She is also the editor of Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan (Coffee House Press, 1991) and The Beat Book (Shambhala, 1996) and is coeditor with Lewis Warsh of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001).

Waldman has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has held the Emily Harvey residency. She worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Tokyo Women’s Christian University. Waldman works with the anti-nuclear Guardianship Project and was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street.

In 2010, her play Red Noir was produced by the Living Theatre. She has collaborated with Meredith Monk, her husband, Ed Bowes, and with the Fast Speaking Music label on multimedia productions and live performances. 

Waldman is a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Book Awards, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. She also served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.