Lucy Sante on An Anthology of New York Poets
Article excerpt
Lucy Sante, a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient, discusses her favorite anthology of New York poets in a new episode of The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast. The series, hosted by Michael Kelleher, features conversations with past and present winners about influential books and plays that have shaped their work. Sante's insights into the New York poetry scene offer a literary perspective on the city's creative tradition and the voices that have defined its cultural landscape.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.
The new season of The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast kicks off with Lucy Sante, recipient of a 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-fiction, talking with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about the long-out-of-print and tremendously influential An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro.
Born in Verviers, Belgium, Lucy Sante is a master excavator of lived experience and an urgent voice for our times. Her contributions to the world of American letters began with Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), a daring descent into the city’s seedy excesses from 1840 to 1920. Beyond its expert narration of New York City’s slums and streets, Low Life established Sante’s signature wit and curiosity, which has been a throughline over her ten works of nonfiction to her most recent I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (2024). Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by the New York Times, this masterpiece of self-revelation chronicles the author’s gender transition in her late 60s. The reader accompanies Sante as she breaks the news to her then-wife and comes out to her students. After a lifetime of maintaining an effortful masculinity, the writer is tired of, as she puts it, “trying at all times to mount a production titled ‘Luc,’ written and directed and produced by and starring me.” Long an astute observer of discovery and rediscovery, whether the subject is a city or herself, Sante, having emerged from a tight circle of luminaries including Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin, is now on the precipice of a second artistic renaissance. As Dwight Garner put it in the New York Times, the life of Lucy Sante is a “story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring.” After teaching at Bard College for over two decades, Sante has retired from academia and lives in Kingston, New York.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.