Introduction by Eleni Sikelianos. This year's Eliot Memorial reading honors poet, performer, cultural activist and literary life-force Anne Waldman: author of more than 40 books of poetry, co-editor of the recent collection New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022), and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

 

In-Person Attendance:  Carpenter Center, Lower Level, 24 Quincy Street.
Free and open to the public.

6:00pm: Pre-event screening of tribute videos for Anne Waldman (optional)
6:30pm: Reading by Anne Waldman, introduced by Eleni Sikelianos
7:30pm: Book-signing 
 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Poet, performer, professor, literary curator, and cultural activist Anne Waldman has been a prolific and active poet and performer for many years, creating radical hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity, and Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. Her most recent works include New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022), which she co-edited with Emma Gomis, and the forthcoming Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2023).

Waldman was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and its Director a number of years; then went on to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diana di Prima in 1974 and its celebrated MFA Program. She has continued to work with the Kerouac School as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program. During the global pandemic, she and co-curator Jeffrey Pethybridge have created the online “Carrier Waves” iteration of the famed Summer Writing Program.