Kenneth Goldsmith

Poet and artist, publisher and founder of the online archive UbuWeb and PennSound.

Kenneth Goldsmith was born in Freeport, New York in 1961. He is a poet and an artist, with a dozen books of poetry and essays to his name, as well as founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and senior editor of PennSound. The hour-long documentary Sucking on Words, which explores his life and practice, premiered in 2007. For fifteen years, Goldsmith hosted a weekly radio show on WFMU, as an extension of his writing experiments, his teaching, and UbuWeb. In 2013 he curated the project Printing out the Internet, which invited the public to print and send pages from the internet to an art gallery in Mexico City. The project controversially accumulated 10 tonnes of paper from 20,000 contributors. In 2015, Goldsmith was the subject of another controversy as a result of a public reading of his poem The Body of Michael Brown, a poeticised version of the autopsy report of a young black man assassinated by a white police officer in Missouri in 2014, an incident that sparked social unrest. He currently teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania.