CCA's MFA in Writings offers a master writer-in-residence project. We invite one writer of national or international prominence in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction to serve as an instructor and voice on trends and issues in writing and literature.

Anne Waldman from New York City’s Greenwich Village is a celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist , a former director and founder of The Poetry project at St Marks’s Church In-the- Bowery and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of The Summer Writing Program. Although a generation younger, Allen Ginsberg often referred to Anne Waldman as his “spiritual wife” and she has been designated a “countercultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly. She is the author of over forty books of poetry, including the book-length hybrid narrative poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), and the feminist 1,000 page epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House 2011) which is the winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Her books of essays include Vow to Poetry, and Outrider. Other recent poetry books include Gossamurmur, (Penguin Poets 2013). Jaguar Harmonics (Post-Apollo Press 2014) and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), co-edited with Laura Wright. Her forthcoming book is Voice’s Daughter of A Heart Yet To Be Born, 2016. She is known for her magnetizing public performances and frequently collaborates with musicians and dancers, including Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore and her son Ambrose Bye. Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013-14) and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, 2015. She has presented her work in festivals all over the world, most recently in India, Morocco, Italy, Finland, Germany and France. Her extensive Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her websites include http//www.annewaldman.org.