Program Information
The Living Thread :: Week Two
Week 2 Schedule
All events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/16
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel:
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair):
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/17
1:00–2:30 PM :: Lecture ::
3:00–4:00 PM ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/18
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: SWP Staff Reading
Thursday, 6/19
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading:
Friday, 6/20
1:00–2:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/21
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading:
Workshop Faculty for Week 2
Workshop :: Anne Waldman
Workshop description forthcoming.
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). Her most recent book from Penguin is Trickster Feminism, and forthcoming: Mesopotopia (2025).
The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Patti Smith has called Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY with cover and interior art by Pat Steir, 2020: “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.”
She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for the manufacturing of pits for nuclear warheads. Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry.
She was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program.
Workshop :: Prageeta Sharma
Workshop description forthcoming.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry, which includes her forthcoming collection Onement Won out from Wave Books this fall. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices, a recent recipient of the 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and is currently the Henry G. Lee ’37 professor of English at Pomona College
Workshop :: Cedar Sigo
Workshop description forthcoming.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
Workshop :: Farid Matuk
Workshop description forthcoming.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb magazine, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry magazine, among others, and they have been anthologized most recently in The Best American Experimental Poetry, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
Workshop :: Jennifer Firestone
Workshop description forthcoming.
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry including her latest collection Story by Ugly Duckling Presse. Firestone is the co-editor of two anthologies, the recently published MIT collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (co-edited with Marcella Durand) and Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax). Firestone co-authored the collection LITtle by LITtle with photographer and urban geographer, Laura Y. Liu. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.
Workshop :: Eleni Sikelianos
Workshop description forthcoming.
Eleni Sikelianos, a graduate of the Kerouac School, is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Your Kingdom and What I Knew (and two hybrid memoirs: The Book of Jon, and You Animal Machine, which has recently been adapted into performance by the Nostalgia Theatre Company in Athens Greece.
Working in ecopoetics for decades, her writings are deeply influenced by family as well as animal and planetary lineages, and have been much anthologized and translated. Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, she has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, among them Philip Glass and Ed Bowes.
MFA Lecture :: TBA
Announcement coming soon!
Dharma Art :: Anna Dinallo
Dr. Anna Dinallo (They/Them) is a lover of complexity, contradiction, and creative investigation.
Dr. D is a curandera cross-trained in expressive arts counseling (MA), linguistic studies (PhD) and Daoist medicine. They are a Doctor of Oriental Medicine practicing acupuncture and herbalism, and a psychotherapist who teaches in the Graduate Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling program at Naropa University. Dr. D’s research and art include reclaiming and connecting with ancestral linages through nature, family constellation, dance, and stories from the stars. The face is the library of lived story and elemental preference. Let’s show face and explore road maps and hidden gems.
May our time together create mirrors and miracles, as the body is a microcosm for the macrocosm.
Special Guest :: Joshua Beckman
Joshua Beckman is a poet, editor, and translator. His most recent books include Animal Days and Tomaž, an extended biographical poem about the life of Tomaž Šalamun created from interviews.
Guest Artist :: Margaret Randall
Poet, independent scholar, photographer, translator, and social activist Margaret Randall was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Sandinista Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, including Che on My Mind (2014), Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018, and I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (2020). Her most recent titles include WILD CARD (Casa Urraca Press) LETTERS FROM THE EDGE: OUTRIDER CONVERSATIONS (New Village Press), Artists in My Life, Luck, and Home. She has received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
