Moderated by Anne Waldman.  Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental  poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor,  editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at  Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife”. She is the author  of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble,  and the poetic text: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson.  Manatee/Humanity  (Penguin Poets 2009) is Waldman’s most recent book. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of  The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa  (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others.  A book translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2010.

"Michael Gizzi was born in Schenectady, New York.  He received his BA and MFA from Brown University, then spent the next decade as a licensed arborist in Southern New England. In the early 1980s he migrated to the Berkshire Hills in western MA, where he began teaching.  For the next twenty years he coordinated many poetry readings and edited lingo magazine and Hard Press...  Back in Rhode Island, Gizzi taught at Brown University where he also coordinated the Downcity Poetry Series and continued publishing, with Craig Watson in Jamestown, RI, the imprint Qua books.  He is currently teaching at Roger Williams University in Bristol and lives in Providence." Gizzi is also one of the authors of LOWELL CONNECTOR: LINES & SHOTS FROM KEROUAC'S TOWN which Small Press Distribution describes: "[a]s homage to a writing hero, and as catalyst for their own work, the authors of LOWELL CONNECTOR made several trips to Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. The procedure was to visit specific sites described in Kerouac's work, taking in the homes, haunts, schools and literary memorials as a kind of memory protein in the activation of their own work. What results is a completely stimulating collaborative effort in which the spirit of Kerouac lives again."   Gizzi is also known for his co-reading of the entirety Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight with Clark Coolidge. 

Roger Brunelle was born in Lowell, MA. He attended Saint-Louis-de-France Elementary School for 9 years, spent his teensin Québec, obtained a BA at the University of Sherbrooke, Québec and an MA in French from the Middlebury Graduate School of French in Paris, France.  After his military service, he worked on the secondary level in Dracut, Lowell, and Ayer, MA and Nashua, NH.  He was a participant and presenter at symposia and colloquia at Assumption College, UMass-Lowell, UMO and Laval University in Québec City. His publications appeared in the NRF in Paris, Yankee Magazine in the USA and in Canada. He is a founding member of the Corporation for the Celebration of Jack Kérouac in Lowell. He started the Kérouac Tours in Lowell, the first two of which he did in French at the request of a group of professors and students from Laval University in Québec City.

Stephen Edington is the President of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. He's an adjunct faculty member at UML teaching a course on The Literature of the Beat Movement. He is the author of "Kerouac's Nashua Connection" and "The Beat Face of God."