Lifetime Beat Laureates | National Beat Poetry Foundation, Inc.

Lifetime New Generation Beat Poet Laureates

Patti Smith's work has had a profound impact on music, literature, and art, and she is considered a cultural icon.
In 2016, Patti famously accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature on behalf of her longtime friend, Bob Dylan.

Patti Smith, is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author, and photographer.

Sanders is the founder of the Investigative Poetry movement. His 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books, influenced investigative writing and poetry. Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York, where he publishes the online Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 56 years, writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders.[14] He also invents musical instruments, including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre, and the Lisa Lyre.

Ed Sanders is a poet and founder of the musical group The Fugs.

Chris Felver has photographEd and filmed the poets, artists, musicians, and visionaries who have shaped our collective imagination. His portraits, whether of Allen Ginsberg mid-gesture or a ceremonial Native dancer at a Connecticut gathering, are not just records of faces, but vessels of time and memory, carefully composed to preserve what the world too often forgets. Felver's films mirror his photographic ethos. Each documentary is a gesture of respect.

Christopher Felver is a cultural documentarian using his camera and speaking his poetry.