Acclaimed actor, writer and director Steve Buscemi recently won the Independent Spirit Award, the New York Film Critics Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in Ghost World directed by Terry Zwigoff. He was also nominated for an Emmy and a DGA Award for directing the “Pine Barrens” episode of HBO’s “The Sopranos.” His resume includes Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train for which he has received an IFP Spirit Award nomination, Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, Martin Scorcese’s New York Stories, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, the Academy Award-winning Fargo and The Big Lebowski, Stanley Tucci’s The Imposters, Con Air, Armageddon, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion, Escape from L.A., Desperado, Domestic Disturbance, Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, Somebody to Love, Robert Altman’s Kansas City and his IFP Spirit Award-winning performance as Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Buscemi made his feature film directorial debut with Trees Lounge, in which he also performed and wrote the screenplay. The film made its debut in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. Buscemi’s second directing effort, Animal Factory, starred Willem Dafoe and Edward Furlong. He is in the process of adapting William Burroughs’ book Queer into a feature film from a script by Oren Moverman.
Anne Waldman, poet, editor, performer, professor, curator, cultural activist, carries in her genetics the lineages of the New American Poetry, and is consiered an inheritor of the Beat (Allen Ginsberg called her his “spiritual wife”) and New York School (Frank O’Hara told her to “work for inspiration, not money”) mantles. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley prize for poetry, and has had residences at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and at the Christian Woman’s University in Tokyo. Directing the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Poetry Project over a decade, she co-founded the Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics with Alan Ginsberg at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in 1974. She currently is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Naropa’s celebrated Summer Writing Program and is working with the Study Abroad on the Bowery project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Author and editor of over 40 books and small press editions of poetry, she has been working for over 25 years on the epic IOVIS project (two volumes published by Coffee House Press, 1993, 1997) and has many recently published other projects. She has been awarded a residency at the Rockefeller’s Bellagio center for April of 2006.
Bob Holman, recently dubbed a member of the “Poetry pantheon” by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Bob Holman has previously been crowned “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” (New York Daily News), “Poetry Czar” (Village Voice), “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen). Holman’s current activities continue to keep poetry headed straight for the heart’s heart. Holman’s first CD, In With the OUt Crowd, moves from rock to country to ballad, shot through with urgent humor and what can only be called, “poetry.” Holman’s latest collection of poems, The Collect Call of the Wild, is Holman’s fifth book. He is currently collaborating on Praise Poems, a book of poems and photos with Chuck Close. Bob fronts poetry into daily life by all means: he won three Emmys over six seasons producing Poetry Spots for WNYC-TV, received a Bessie Performance Award, has twice been Featured Artist at the Chicago Poetry Video Festival and won International Public Television Awards for USOP and Words in Your Face, a production of the PBS series “Alive TV.” He is currently Visiting Professor of Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.