Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist. Allen Ginsberg has often referred to Waldman as his "spiritual wife." She is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1974), Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Poets, 2000), the book-length hybrid Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009), and the feminist 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. Waldman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013–14) and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.