Bob Holman

As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist.

At Columbia, Holman studied with Kenneth Koch, Eric Bentley, and Michael Wood but claims that his "major poetry schooling," was "the Lower East Side, with Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, Miguel Piñero, Hettie Jones, Ed Sanders, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Pedro Pietri, David Henderson, Steve Cannon, et al."[3] Since its founding in 1966, the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York has been (according to John Ashbery) "a major force in contemporary American literature.

Other members of the troupe included Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, Roland Legiardi-Laura, Madeleine Keller, Nathan Whiting and Cassia Berman.

Since its founding by Miguel Algarín in 1973, the Nuyorican Poets Café's purpose "has always been to provide a stage for the artists traditionally under-represented in the mainstream media and culture.

Since then the imprint has published 13 titles, including works by Taylor Mead, Janet Hamill, Fay Chiang, Paul L. Mills and Black Cracker.

In 1971 he co-founded the Woods Hole Theater Company with Karen Cutler, Philip Himberg, and Shaine Marinson, [13] where he was Gogo in Waiting for Godot, and created a community version of the Wizard of Oz.

Over the course of the next three years the label released 18 titles, including recordings by the Last Poets,[21] Allen Ginsberg,[22] and Sekou Sundiata,[23] two CDs of short fiction from The New Yorker magazine,[24] and a two-CD set of readings of Edgar Allan Poe[25] produced by Hal Willner.

Mouth Almighty's four-CD box set of readings by William Burroughs,[26] produced by the poet John Giorno, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999.

[29][30] In 1996 Holman, director Mark Pellington, and producer Joshua Blum teamed up to create "The United States of Poetry,"[31] a critically acclaimed five-part PBS television series.

[32] In a review for The New York Times, John J. O'Connor wrote, "Wandering all over the map, geographical and literary, 'The United States of Poetry' unabashedly celebrates the Word.

In a review for 'The New York Times', Stephen Holden wrote, "The [soundtrack] illustrates how thoroughly the lines between literature and popular culture have dissolved over the last 40 years.

"[36] Among Holman's first teaching jobs was a stint in July 1991 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which had been founded at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado by Chogyam Trungpa, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974.

[39] In 2003 Holman relocated to Columbia University's School of the Arts where, as a visiting professor of Writing, he taught the graduate course "Exploding Text: Poetry Performance.

The documentary film focuses upon the rapid extinction of many of planet Earth's human languages and the multifarious struggles and efforts to save and preserve them.

The screening tours and workshops were detailed by Holman in a chapter in "Language and Globalization: An Autoethnographic Approach", edited by Maryam Borjian and due for publication by Routledge in 2017.

[46] Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library, has said Holman's collection "is a magnificent resource for anyone who cares about New York's spoken word scene during the last 40 years.