Poet, beat poet, performer, professor, cultural-political activist and publisher. In 1974, together with Diane Di Prima and Allen Ginsberg, she founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she still directs the famous summer writing program. She is also a founding member of The Poetry Project at St Mark‘s Church In-the-Bowery New York.

In 2015, she received the American Book Award for her Lifetime Achievement.

Waldmann has been fighting for social change all her life and is committed to her vision of a world safe for poetry. She sees her poems as a cultural intervention, e.g. the 1000-page Iovis Trilogy, 2011. She has worked with numerous artists, musicians and dancers, e.g. Judith Malina (Living Theatre) or Kiki Smith. Patti Smith described her last vinyl album Sciamachy (2020, with Laurie Anderson, among others) as „exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times“.

She wrote more than 60 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s legendary City Lights Books in San Francisco, Trickster Feminism, 2018, a new collection of essays, interviews, letters, and poems entitled Bard, Kinetic, 2023, as well as her classic, Vow to Poetry.

www.annewaldman.org

On Friday, Anne Waldman will officially open the festival with an Opening Message Video.