Press Release

Anne Waldman Receives Residency Award from Rockefeller Foundation

Founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
To Spend April at Bellagio

BOULDER, Colo. (March 9, 2006)—Anne Waldman, co-founder of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, has been awarded a residency by the Rockefeller Foundation at their Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. This honor is granted each year to approximately 140 artists, scholars and professionals around the world. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio offers residents “a rare combination: individual contemplation and collegial engagement, disciplined work and space for reflection.” Waldman will spend the month of April in residence at Bellagio, working on Wheel of Time, a new book based on the Buddhist Kalachakra initiation. “After leaving Bellagio,” says Waldman, “I will also be giving a reading in Florence and visiting the artist George Scheeman, with whom I have collaborated over the years, in his home near Sienna.”

Waldman is a poet, editor, performer, essayist, and cultural activist. Her recent performances have included a beat reading with actor Steve Buscemi at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, a reading at the Rubin Museum and an event at the Tanner Symposium in Utah with Michael McClure and Bill Berkson. Her most recent books are Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin 2004) and In The Room Of Never Grieve: New & Selected Poems with accompanying CD (Coffee House Press 2003). She is author and editor of more than 40 books and small press editions of poetry. After directing the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York City for more than a decade, she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa in 1974. She is currently a distinguished professor and chair of Naropa’s Summer Writing Program and is working with the Study Abroad on the Bowery project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Naropa University is a private, nonprofit, nonsectarian liberal arts institution dedicated to advancing contemplative education. This approach to learning integrates the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions, helping students know themselves more deeply and engage constructively with others. The university comprises a four-year undergraduate college and graduate programs in the arts, education, environmental leadership, psychology and religious studies. It offers BA, BFA, MA, MFA and MDiv degrees, as well as professional development training and classes for the community. In addition, the university runs study abroad programs in Sikkim, India and Prague, Czech Republic. For more information, visit www.naropa.edu.

Contact:

Jane Rubinstein
Director, Marketing & Communications
Naropa University
PH 303-245-4643
FAX 303-245-4676
Jrubinstein@naropa.edu
www.naropa.edu