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George Wallace

Award winning poet, musician, and educator, based in NYC and traveling worldwide.

About Me

George Wallace is a world- traveling poet and New York City native. He is writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, author of 42 chapbooks and 5 spoken word albums (US, UK, Italy, Greece, Macedonia, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, India, Spain). He is an award-winning journalist and community activist, former Peace Corps Volunteer, and is known for his efforts in support of communities of poets across the US and abroad. An adjunct professor of English at Pace University, he is founding editor of long-standing poetry literary magazines in print and online, including Poetrybay, Polarity, Long Island Quarterly, Walt’s Corner and Radiopoet!que. AWARDS & HONORS Major poetry awards and honors include Orpheus Prize (BG); Alexander Prize, Aristotle Medal (GR); Silk Road Prize, Boao Poet of the Year, Beijing Poetry Fim Festival (CN); Naim Frasheri Laureateship (MK); Corona d'Oro (AL); Naji Naaman Literary Prize (LB). Major festival appearances include Medellin (CO), Ledbury (GB), Aguacatan (GT); Lyric Recovery/ Carnegie Hall, What Saves Us/ Lincoln Center, US Library of Congress, Sapphofest, Woody Guthrie Festival, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, Festival Ecstatique, Camp Casey, Church of Beethoven, Bradstock, and Howlfest (US). APPEARANCES In addition to worldwide appearances at major performing spaces in the UK (Robert Burns Centre, Dylan Thomas Centre, Words By The Water, Bolton/ Worktown, Swarthmoor Hall, Brantwood, Brewery Arts Centre, Maddy Prior Stone Barn) and Europe (Avignon Theatre Festival, Shakespeare & Company, Tivoli Gardens, Piccolo Museo di Poesia, Brunneberg Castle, Bageon/ Omonoia Circus), George has been regular featured at popular venues across the US (LA, SF, KC, Cleveland, San Antonio, Taos, Northampton, Woodstock, Washington DC), and particularly in his base of operations in NYC (Five Spot, Bitter End, Poisson Rouge, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Cafe, Gathering of the Tribes, Cornelia Street Cafe, Jujomukti Lounge, Parkside Lounge, Knitting Factory, Smalls Jazz Club, West End Cafe). Since 2018 he has been recognized as Lifetime National Beat Laureate and Next Generation Beat (US), and his work is housed at the Hofstra University special collections archives. MUSICAL INFLUENCE An award-winning musician in his formative years, George could read music and play keyboards at the age of 4 and by the age of 18 had racked up performing experiences in the New York tri- state area as a vocalist, folk guitarist and R&B keyboardist. In the 60s he frequented jazz, folk and blues clubs in Greenwich Village. In recent years he has performed onstage as a spoken word vocalist at festivals and performance venues worldwide; shared the performance stage with David Amram, Paul Winston, Glen Moore, Leonard Lehrman, Thurston Moore, Grant Hart, Bob Feldman, Eric Person, Martin Loyato, Jorn Swart; opened for Joan Baez, Steve Earle, Levon Helm, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan; and recorded with Kevin Twigg, Tom Gould, Philip Dragoumis, Bikithi Kumalo, Tony Lamb, Alabaster DePlume, Francesco Paolo Paladino, Ana Spasic, Gianni Azzali, Rishiraj Kulkarni. He has been influenced by and worked with fellow contemporary jazz/spoken word poets John Sinclair, ML Liebler, Steve Dalachinsky, Emily XYZ, Ira Cohen, Andy Clausen, Janine Pommy Vega, Moe Seager and Kirpal Gordon, among others. EDUCATION BA, Syracuse University; MPH, UNC-Chapel Hill; MFA, Pacific University; Honorary Doctorate, CiESART/Royal Academy of Spain.

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My Jazz Story

My father was a 'kiddie performer' in Vaudeville days, and as a small boy I learned first-hand from him how to work a bar club crowd. As a pre-teen I was formally grounded as a keyboardist on music from the Great American Songbook. As a young teen, my beatnik sister exposed me to major west coast, cool and modal jazz performers. In my later teens, I was a performer with a NYC R&B band, cutting my teeth on James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Ben E. King, and performing at clubs from NYC to the Hamptons. In college I roomed with jazz trumpeter Frankie Grasso (later a big band leader in Holland), exploring jazz and particular bebop music with him in late night talks and album sessions; and after college I was close friends with Scott K Fish (commentator for Modern Drummer and founder of Beyond The Cymbals blog), who played a major role in exposing me to the vocabulary of free jazz and avante garde jazz talents of the 50s and 60s. As a NYC commuter, I was a devoted listener to Columbia's Phil Schaap and Bird Flight, his scholarly, detailed and exquisitely rambling radio show on KPFA -- five days a week and for six years -- figuratively sitting at the feet of the master as he meticulously examined the life and art of Charlie Parker. Over 40 years as a practicing poet, I have engaged in a lifelong quest to incorporate the formal musical underpinnings of Bop Prosody (Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others) into the American poetic idiom, as founded in the writings of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay.