New York School

Michael Brownstein is a poet, a novelist, and an activist. Often associated with Beat writing and both the New York School and a second generation of New York School poets, Brownstein moved to New York City...

A group of poets aligned with the New York School of painting in the 1950s and ’60s.

David Antin was born in New York City. He earned an MA in linguistics at City College of New York, where he studied the work of Gertrude Stein, a poet whose avant-garde aesthetic and interest in art would ...

Simon Pettet is an English-born poet and long-time resident of New York's Lower East Side. John Ashbery described him as a “pillar of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the core of all that is New York about the...

Michael Lally was born in New Jersey into a working-class family. He joined the Air Force before gravitating toward the poetry scenes associated with both the Beats and the second generation New York School...

Poet, translator, and jazz pianist Bill Zavatsky was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He earned his BA and MA from Columbia University, where he took classes with Kenneth Koch. Zavatsky also studied music ...

Painter, art critic, and poet John Fairfield Porter was born outside Chicago, the fourth of five children of architect James Porter and poet Ruth Furness Porter. He earned a BA at Harvard University, where...

Tony Towle was born and raised in New York City. Associated with the New York School poets, Towle was a student of both Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. His first collection, North (1971) won the Frank O’Hara...

Dick Gallup was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 1950s. In Tulsa, he befriended poet Ron Padgett and poet and artist Joe Brainard; the three went on to produce ...

Born in New York City’s Spanish Harlem, poet Frank Lima earned an MFA from Columbia University, where he studied with Stanley Kunitz. As a member of the New York School, Lima wrote raw, wry, vulnerable poems...

Paul Violi was born and raised on Long Island, in New York State. He earned a BA in English from Boston University and served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria from 1966 to 1967. An active editor and a teacher...

Poet, editor, and performer Kenward Elmslie was born in New York City and raised in Colorado Springs and Washington, DC. His father was a British businessman, and his mother was the daughter of newspaper magnate...

Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson was a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who became active in the art and literary worlds in his early twenties. He was professor emeritus at the San Francisco...

One of the principal members of the second generation of the New York School poets, Lewis Warsh’s long career spanned the experimental writing movement on both coasts and produced a wealth of poems, novels...

Jim Carroll was born in New York City and descended from three generations of Irish Catholic bartenders. He grew up on the Lower East Side before moving with his family to Upper Manhattan when he was twelve...

Tom Clark combined diverse roles of poet, biographer, novelist, dramatist, reviewer, and sportswriter during his writing career. In addition to dozens of books of poetry, a play, two novels, two story collections...

Anne Waldman has been an active member of what she terms the “outrider” experimental poetry community for more than four decades. She has written more than 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (2001), published...

Poet, editor, and translator Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a high-school student he founded the avant-garde literary journal The White Dove Review with his friends and fellow students Joe Brainard...

Ted Berrigan was born Edmund Joseph Michael Berrigan, Jr. in Providence, Rhode Island, the oldest of three children of Margaret Dugan and Edmund Berrigan, the chief engineer at Ward’s Baking Company. On both...

Aram Saroyan is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright. He attended the University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University, but did not complete a degree. The son of the writer William...