Edward Sanders, born August 17, 1939, in Kansas City, Missouri, is an American poet, author, publisher, social activist, and longtime member of the rock band The Fugs. He is widely regarded as a bridge between the Beat and hippie generations and a central figure in the 1960s counterculture. After dropping out of the University of Missouri in 1958, he moved to New York City to attend New York University, graduating in 1964 with a degree in Greek.
His first major work, "Poem from Jail", written on toilet paper while imprisoned in 1961 for protesting nuclear submarine launches, established his voice as a radical poet. In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and in 1965 opened the Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side, a hub for Bohemians and radicals. The bookstore was raided in 1966, leading to an obscenity charge and a high-profile appearance on the cover of Life magazine.
Sanders is the founder of Investigative Poetry, a movement formalized in his 1976 manifesto published by City Lights Books. This approach led to book-length poems on historical and literary figures, including Chekhov, 1968: A History in Verse, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, and the multi-volume America, A History in Verse (1998–2004). He has also written acclaimed nonfiction, such as The Family (1971), a profile of the Charles Manson murders, and Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy (2018).
He has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an American Book Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York, where he co-publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife, Miriam R. Sanders, and continues to invent musical instruments and create art, including works in Egyptian hieroglyphs.