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Ed Sanders to Deliver Keynote Lecture

Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders, poet, activist, and musician of countercultural fame and influence, confirmed that he will grace the conference as a keynote speaker. The topic of his lecture and the second keynote speaker will be announced in due course.

Keynote speaker Edward Sanders (*1939) is a poet, musician, activist, historian, writer and one of the central countercultural figures of the late 1960s. He acted as a bridge between the Beat generation and the 1960s counterculture and has been featured on the cover of Life Magazine.

Ed Sanders is the author of around thirty books. His most recent one, illustrated by Rick Veitch, is Broken Glory, the Final Years of Robert Kennedy. His manifesto, “Investigative Poetry” has inspired several book-length biographies in verse, including Chekhov, a Biography in Verse, and The Poetry & Life of Allen Ginsberg. Other books of his include Tales of Beatnik Glory (4 volumes published in a single edition), 1968, a History in Verse; and The Family, a history of the Charles Manson murder group. His 1987 collection, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, won an American Book Award. In late 2011 Da Capo Press published his memoir of the 1960s, Fug You.

He has received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, a 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Prize, and other awards for his writing.

Sanders was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs, which has released around 18 albums during its nearly fifty-year history. Sanders also released eight solo albums.

He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.

For a more complete biography, bibliography, and discography, read Ed Sanders' Wikipedia entry or the Ed Sanders Archive over at Granary Books.

Photograph: Miriam Sanders.