Ed Friedman
American poet and playwright
Ed Friedman (born January 12, 1950) is an American poet and playwright.
Friedman was born in Los Angeles, California, and studied literature at the University of California at San Diego. He moved to New York City in 1971 and soon after enrolled in one of Bernadette Mayer's workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. From this came the magazine Unnatural Acts, with collaborative contents presented anonymously, which Mayer and Friedman put out from 1972 to 1973.
Friedman then "invented performance poetry" when he began to oversee the Project's Monday night readings series during the period 1974 to 1976. He became the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project in 1987 and served in that capacity until 2003, the longest term of any AD for the Project.
Friedman has given readings and performances at the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, and The Public Theater, among other venues. He has collaborated with visual artist Robert Kushner – whose hat designs worn by models descending a spiral staircase were accompanied by Friedman's poetry, published in The New York Hat Line (1979), and who designed the settings for Friedman's 1982 play The White Snake – and Kim MacConnel – on several projects about learning a new language (Lingomats, 1980) and an illustrated phrasebook (La Frontera, 1983). – He also collaborated with composer Peter Gordon on the play with music Chinoiserie, presented at The Kitchen in 1978.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28366922. VIAF identifies the subject as 93731189. The Library of Congress control number is n79025533. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1971, 1972 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ed Friedman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.