"The People Want Peace" will be the theme of this evening's Dada Literary Café as we welcome three distinguished literary giants: Anne Waldman, Laura Hinton & Sarah Riggs.
Anne Waldman has been an active member of what she terms the “outrider” experimental poetry community for more than four decades. She has written more than 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (2001), published by City Lights Books; Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2022); and Vow to Poetry (Coffee House Press, 2001). She is the author of selected poetry editions, including Helping the Dreamer (Coffee House Press, 1989), Kill or Cure (Penguin Books, 1994), and In the Room of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press, 2008). Waldman has written on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Books, 2000); Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Books, 2004); Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009); and Gossamurmur (Penguin Books, 2013). Her anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment—a 25-year project—won the PEN Center Award for Poetry. Other books include Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha: Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha (translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman, Shambhala Publications, 2020), Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018), Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen, 2017), and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press, 2016), which, in Lyn Hejinian’s words, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge.” Waldman is one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and a cofounder with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the Western Hemisphere. Waldman is a distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary and oral archives and curate the celebrated Summer Writing Program.
Laura Hinton is the author of The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), and co-editor of We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics (University of Alabama Press). Her critical essays, poet interviews, and reviews have appeared in books and journals including Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, Postmodern Culture, Textual Practice, Women's Studies, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Poetry Project Newsletter, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among others. She is also a poet, and published the poetry book, Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub), with BlazeVox Books. Individual prose and hybrid poems, as well as her photography and poetry videos, have been published in journals including Yew, Madhatter Review, Esque, Feminist Studies, Bird Dog, Sonaweb, How2, Poets for Living Waters, Nth Position, Poetic Voices without Borders, Poetry in Performance, Poetryseen, and others.She also publishes experimental memoirs using poet's prose, most recently a piece called "Caretaker," about the American medical system, which is on line in The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She regularly publishes editorial work for journals, most recently co-editing a special issue on poet's theater for Postmodern Culture. She is working on a new critical book on the topic of contemporary American women's hybrid poetics and visual theory, and a collection of edited essays on "feminist superheros" Jayne Cortez and Adrienne Rich. She has been professor of Literature at City College of New York for 33 years where she teaches the course on Experimental Female Poets of the 21st C. She is the founder and publisher of the poetry journal Chant de la Sirene at www.chantdelasirene.com.
Sarah Riggs is the author of seven books of poetry in English: Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015) which won a 1913 poetry prize, Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle, fall 2021. She is the author of the book of essays Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, & O’Hara (Routledge, 2002), and has translated and co-translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including most recently Etel Adnan’s TIME which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. She is the director of the international arts organization Tamaas which focuses on earth arts justice, film, and an annual poetry translation seminar. She is also a member of the bilingual poetry association Double Change. Sarah Riggs has taught in recent years at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn after years of teaching at the NYU and Columbia programs in Paris, and before that at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she got her Ph.D. in literature. Sarah Riggs lives in Brooklyn, NY.