History

The Summer Writing Program (SWP) is the birthplace of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded in 1974 by the late Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. Naropa University, as an educational zone, champions the building and strengthening of community. The Kerouac School is known and celebrated for its ongoing sense of comradeship among writers, teachers and students.

The tradition emphasized is of the “Outrider” or left-hand lineage, which operates outside the corporate cultural mainstream—a heritage of powerful scholarship and counter-poetics.

Naropa alumni continue to contribute to the cultural landscape of the Boulder/Denver area, running various local reading series and performance venues. The SWP serves as an interactive meeting round for prospective students, current students, alumni and local artists to share ideas and take a more visible role in supporting the literary arts in our local community.

The program provides three distinct forums: writing workshops directed by guest and resident faculty; lectures, readings, panels and colloquia; and faculty-student interviews in which writings and ideas are discussed face-to-face. The traditional roles of “teacher” and “student” are broken down as communication and learning flows between writer and writer.

Click here for the Kerouac Festival 2007

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003