Anne Waldman was born on April 2, 1945, in Millville, New Jersey. From an early age, Waldman expressed a strong affinity for poetry, reading and writing voraciously. She attended grade school in New York City, where her family moved shortly after her birth. During high school at a Quaker institution, Waldman volunteered her time in and contributed her writing to several writing clubs, including service as the editor of the school’s newspaper and of its literary magazine. She and her closest friends obsessed over poetry, writing original work and reading that of the modern poets such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. It was also in high school that Waldman discovered Buddhism, a religion so impressive and fitting to her that she allowed it to spiritually guide her through the rest of her life.

Waldman attended Bennington College in Vermont in the mid-1960s and grew more deeply attached to poetry. She emulated writers such as Emily Dickinson and Hilda Doolittle and often suggested studying contemporary poets in … [Waldman also booked hundred of other poets to read their work at the Project, making her one of the most avid promoters of contemporary poetry] …her English classes, requests that were normally shot down. She experimented with different styles of poetry, stepping outside of the box to create a voice that uniquely reflected her wandering, aesthetic mind. On a trip to a poetry conference in Berkeley, California, in 1965, Waldman met Lewis Warsh, a poet from New York who she married two years later. The pair founded Angel Hair magazine, and until 1970 when they divorced, worked at St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Waldman arranged poetry readings for the Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, beginning a revolution of such events. She read poems with such ferocity and animation that the readings became a type of performance art, almost identical in its abstractness to the poetry itself. Waldman also booked hundred of other poets to read their work at the Project, making her one of the most avid promoters of contemporary poetry. Upon leaving the Project, she and Allen Ginsberg, fellow poet and frequent performer at St. Mark’s, cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974. Later in the decade, Waldman met Reed Bye and married him in 1980. That same year, she gave birth to her only son, Edwin Ambrose.

Waldman has published over three dozen collections of poetry throughout her career and continues to write. She has also translated a book of Buddhist scripture and edited several anthologies of poetry. She currently teaches and directs the Writing and Poetics program at Naropa, living in both Boulder, Colorado and New York City.