Anselm Berrigan grew up in New York City, where he currently resides with his wife, poet Karen Weiser.From 2003 to 2007, he served as artistic director at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. He is the brother of poet and musician Edmund Berrigan, half-brother of Kate Berrigan and scientist David Berrigan, son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan, and stepson of the late English poet and prose writer Douglas Oliver. He is a co-chair of the writing program at the Bard College summer MFA program and an adjunct teacher at Brooklyn College. He has also taught writing at Wesleyan University, Rutgers University, Pratt Institute and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.
Anselm Berrigan’s poetry makes associative leaps of personal and political observation. Keith Taylor, reviewing Free Cell for arborweb (Ann Arbor online), noted that Berrigan “comes back to the basic elements of American speech and the direct representation of emotion, an attitude he seems to trust even as he forces us to challenge the prejudices of our own experience with language.”