Master Class: Anne Waldman

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Anne Waldman ’66 is a prolific and active poet, performer, and cultural activist who has authored more than forty-five volumes of poetry and poetics, including Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1975), Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin, 2000), the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House, 2011), and, most recently, Trickster Feminism (Penguin, 2018). Connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School, she was a founder and director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, in 1974 going on to found and direct the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy American Poets, she has been recognized with the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN Center Literary Award for poetry. She collaborates extensively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers ranging from Kiki Smith to Meredith Monk to Thurston Moore, was poet-in-residence for Bob Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour, and regularly performs internationally.