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Ron Padgett (born June 17, 1942) is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Bean Spasms, Padget's first collection of poems, was published in 1967 and written with Ted Berrigan Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More - Ron Padgett. His books include: Great Balls of Fire, The Adventures of Mr. & Mrs. Jim & Ron (with Jim Dine), Toujours l'amour, Tulsa Kid, Triangles in the Afternoon, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan, Poems I Guess I Wrote, You Never Know, Oklahoma Tough, and others.

Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He began writing poems at the age of eighteen in spiral notebooks. He later received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1964 and studied creative writing at Wagner College with Kay Boyle, Howard Nemerov, and Kenneth Koch. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and studied 20th-century French literature in Paris during 1965 and 1966. In 1996, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Padgett was a poetry workshop instructor at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, New York, NY, from 1968-69 and a poet in various New York City Poets in the Schools programs from 1969-76. He was director of publications for Teachers & Writers Collaborative from around 1982 to 1999. His works on education and writing include The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (editor), The Teachers & Writers Guide to Walt Whitman (editor), Educating the Imagination (co-editor), and many others. He was also editor of Teachers & Writers Magazine from 1980 to 2000.

He was a cofounder/publisher of Full Court Press (publisher)and editor from 1973-88. He has lectured at educational institutions, including Atlantic Center for the Arts and Columbia University, He has also been the host of a radio series on poetry and the designer of computer writing games.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ron Padgett", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0