Lewis Warsh

Lewis Warsh was born November 9, 1944, in the Bronx, New York. He received his BA and MA in English from City College of New York.

In the mid 1960s, with Anne Waldman, he established the influential magazine Angel Hair, which published poets including Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, and Denise Levertov. "From the start," Lewis wrote in the introduction to The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001), "the contents of the magazine mirrored our social encounters as much as any fixed aesthetic." 

Warsh is affiliated with the second generation of the New York School of Poets, including Berrigan, Brainard, Waldman, and Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, among others, who helped establish the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on the lower east side of Manhattan. 

In the late 1970s, Warsh launched the magazine United Artists and United Artists Books with Bernadette Mayer. 

In addition to several novels and nonfiction works, Warsh authored more than twenty collections of poetry, including Out of the Question (Station Hill Press, 2017), Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), Donatello (Third Floor Apartment Press, 2011), and Inseparable: Poems 1995–2005 (Granary Books, 2008). 

Warsh was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry, and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English. He taught at Naropa University, SUNY Albany, and Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, where he was founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He died on November 15, 2020.