Ed Sanders is a poet and performer whose roots go back to the Beats and early Grove Press. He was active in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. He began publishing the mimeographed magazine Fuck You! a Magazine of the Arts in 1962 and in 1965, started the Peace Eye Bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which became a center for countercultural and antiwar activities. He was a founding member of the satiric folk-rock band Fugs and also of the Yippies. He helped found the underground newspaper The East Village Other and wrote numerous articles for the Underground Press network. He has received Guggenheim and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships as well as a poetry fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He is the author of numerous works of poetry and nonfiction, including Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems, 1961-1985, winner of an American Book Award, 1968: A History in Verse, and the nonfiction work The Family, about Charles Manson and his dystopic communal family. He lives in Woodstock, New York