Fortner Anderson
American poet, performance artist
Fortner Anderson (born 1955) is an American-born poet, performance artist, and visual artist who has lived in Montreal, Quebec, since 1976. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and has published many audio recordings of his spoken word performances, and is known for innovative use of technology to present poetry readings.
Early life
Anderson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Career
In 1985, Anderson founded Dial-A-Poem Montreal, a free, 24-hour telephone hotline that users could call to hear a different poem each day, usually read by its author. About 150 poets contributed to the project, mostly from the Montreal area. On its first anniversary, the participants organized the “100 Poets" party, a gallery event which included eleven continuous hours of recorded audio and video poetry performance as well as live contributions from dozens of attending poets. Dial-A-Poem Montreal was inspired by a similar poetry hotline service operated by performance poet John Giorno in New York from 1968 to 1972, also called Dial-A-Poem.
In 1987, Anderson collaborated with writer Ian Ferrier and illustrator Phillip MacKenzie to publish The Heart of the Machine, an electronic interactive serial novel accessible through one of several information services that users would have to dial up from their computers.
In the 1990s Anderson and Ferrier began broadcasting recordings of poetry on the McGill University campus community radio station, CKUT-FM; the pair received a Standard Broadcasting Award for this innovation. Anderson continued to host a weekly radio program called "Dromotexte / Pirate Bloc Radio" on CKUT-FM, featuring spoken word and poetry recordings.
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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 Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83688183. VIAF identifies the subject as 106026246. The Library of Congress control number is no2002073215. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1976, 1985 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fortner Anderson” 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.