Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman

Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. But has raised the bar as a feminist, activist and powerful performer.

Anne was a featured poet at the 2026 Venice Biennale, performing as part of the Poet’s Caravan, as well as other events for the opening of the festival. Anne has read in the streets as well as numerous larger venues such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India and continues to teach poetics all over the world. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.

Biblioteca de la Ciudadela José Vasconcelos Centro Histórico, Mexico City, January 2020

She is the author of more than 60 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco; a new collection of essays, interviews, letters, and poems entitled Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2022); as well as her classic, Vow to Poetry.

Waldman is the author of many selected poetry editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and Gossamurmur a meditation on Archive. Her monumental 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 recent 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 (2016), which, as Lyn Hejinian says, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge.” Waldman’s major publishers are Penguin Poets and Coffee House Press.

She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with—Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima—the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Ginsberg has called Waldman his “spiritual wife.” She 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.