Summer Writing Program 2025

This program, founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg celebrates its 51st year! This year’s theme, The Living Thread, is inspired by this duet between Meredith Monk and Anne Waldman recorded at the Jack kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics: The Living. 

The Living Thread is an invocation and invitation to students, scholars and friends out there in league with magnanimous angels, dakinis, protectors of mind and lokapalas (guardians) of our Naropa commons. We summon wisdom holders, ancestors, founders, lineages traditional and wild, of art, music and poetry under the great Naropa Sycamores.

We are ready once again to WRITE, to read, to make books, to meditate, to think on our own, converse and study with investigative intention to move mountains, and listen to one another in the myriad ways we know how to.  We also compose on the tongue, mouth syllables, collaborate together with performative glee. Among the skyscrapers of NYC Frank O’Hara told us to lookup more often. Here we touch the stars and Perseid showers and bathe in negative ions for mental acuity. We practice tonglen ritual, a vow of empathy for everyone.  We notice and make note of all the particulars of this entangled Indra’s Net with tenderness, opposition, and the mantra  Do No Harm. 

Writing is our psychic shield. Come make your own version and thread of “survival dancing”.

As part of a contemplative education project, and an experiment in community, the Summer Writing Program does not engage in gatekeeping, and all writers, artists, and interested or curious students are welcome to register—there is no application fee. Scholarships available.