Poetry Reading | Poets Anne Waldman and Lee Ann Brown read their work

Anne Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, in 1945. Recently deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly, Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. From 1966 until 1978, Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York, and in 1974, together with Allen Ginsberg, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of more than 40 books and 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, Manatee/Humanity (all published by Penguin Poets) and the anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011). Her numerous anthologies include Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, and the co-edited collections Civil Disobediences, The Angel Hair Anthology, and Beats at Naropa. She has recently collaborated with artist Pat Steir on CRY STALL GAZE, which will be published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers University in 2012. Her CD The Milk of Universal Kindness, with music by Ambrose Bye, was released in 2011. Waldman is a recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Waldman is the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired university on the North American continent, and divides her time between Boulder and New York City.

Lee Ann Brown was born in Tokyo, raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and received her MFA in poetry from Brown University. She is the author of Polyverse, The Sleep That Changed Everything, and The Voluptuary Lion Poems of Spring, and is the publisher of Tender Buttons press, publishing experimental poetry by women. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the Howard Foundation, and the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France. She currently divides her time between New York City, where she teaches poetry at St. John’s University, and Marshall, North Carolina, where she founded and directs the French Broad Institute (of Time & the River).