[1] Born in Millville, New Jersey, Waldman was raised on MacDougal Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, and received her B.A.

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.

She has been a vocal proponent for feminist, environmental, and human rights causes; an active participant in Poets Against the War; and she has helped organize protests in New York and Washington, D. C. Waldman says that her life's work is to "keep the world safe for poetry".

While attending the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, Waldman, with poet Lewis Warsh, was inspired to found Angel Hair, a small press that produced a magazine of the same name and a number of smaller books.

They worked on the film while traveling through New England and Canada with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a concert tour that made impromptu stops, entertaining enthusiastic crowds with poetry and music.

Waldman, Ginsberg, and Dylan were joined on these caravans by musicians including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson, and Joe Cocker.

Waldman credits her poem "Fast Speaking Woman" as the seminal work that galvanized her idea of poetry as performance.

Over the course of her career, Waldman has also been a tireless collaborator, producing works with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Meredith Monk, George Schneeman, Donna Dennis, Pat Steir; musicians Don Cherry, Laurie Anderson, and Steve Lacy; dancer Douglas Dunn; filmmaker and husband Ed Bowes; and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye.

She has served as an advisor to the Prazska Skola Projekt in Prague, the Study Abroad on the Bowery (since 2004), and has been a faculty member in the New England College Low Residency MFA Program (since 2003).

[9] Her archive of historical, literary, art, tape, and extensive correspondence materials (including many prominent literary correspondents, such as: William S. Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey) resides at the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[11] In an interview with The Wire from the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017, Waldman was asked about the way her poetry crosses forms and incorporates songs and chants, and how she develops this type of poem.

The exhibit includes visual art by poets such as William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joanne Kyger.