About Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets. == Personal life == Born in Millville, New Jersey, Waldman was raised on MacDougal Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, and received her B.A. degree from Bennington College in 1966. She is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, having studied and practiced within this tradition since 1970. Waldman has been quoted, describing growing up in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s: "we benefited from the trials of young women who had struggled to be creative and assertive before us, and we were certainly aware of the exciting artistic and liberal heritage of our New York environs and yet many of us fell into the same retrograde traps. Being dominated by relationships with men— letting our own talents lag, following their lead — which could really result in drug dependencies, painful abortions, alienation from family and friends… I knew interesting and creative women who became junkies for their boyfriends, who stole for their boyfriends, who concealed their poetry and artistic aspirations, who slept around to be popular, who had serious eating disorders, who concealed their unwanted pregnancies raising money for abortions on their own, who put the child up for adoption, who never felt like they owned and appreciated their bodies. I knew women who lived secret or double lives because love and sexual attraction to another woman was an anathema. I knew women in daily therapy because their fathers had abused them, or women who got sent away to mental hospitals or special schools because they'd taken a black lover. Some ran away from home.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.