Anne Waldman is a poet, professor, performer, cultural activist, and the author of many books and small press editions of poetry and poetics, including Manatee/Humanity, The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems 1985–2003, and Fast-Speaking Woman. She is also the editor of a number of anthologies, including The Portable Beat Reader, co-edited with ed. Ann Charters. With Allen Ginsberg, she co-founded of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974.