Jack Kerouac School

It was founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, as part of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s 100-year experiment and named after the Beatnick writer Jack Kerouac.

Students at the Kerouac School are encouraged to take classes across an open genre curriculum, thus enabling a personal development of the creative writing process and style by challenging the notion of generic art. The school creates a space for radical exploration and experimentation while cultivating contemplative and experimental writing practices and original and innovative approaches to literature.

The Summer Writing program at the school gathers over sixty guest faculty to an internationally renowned colloquium of workshops, lectures, and readings. The aim of The Summer Writing program is to foster an intensely creative environment for students to develop their writing projects in conversation with a community of renowned writers.

The school currently has three fully funded fellowships: the Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Anselm Hollo Graduate Fellowships: awarded annually to students in graduate instructor positions.

In When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (2004), Sam Kashner wrote an account of his time as the first student of the school.

• Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics on Naropa University site
• Official Blog
• Naropa Poetics Audio Archives at Archive.org
• Anne Waldman, Marilyn Webb, (Eds) Talking poetics from Naropa Institute: annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Volume 1, Taylor & Francis, 1979, ISBN 978-0-394-73569-6
• Anne Waldman, Marilyn Webb, (Eds) Talking poetics from Naropa Institute: annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Volume 2, Taylor & Francis, 1979, ISBN 978-0-394-73691-4