Ron Kolm

Who is Ron Kolm?

Ron Kolm is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City. Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. Kolm's career in NYC independent bookstores spanned some forty years. After he left the Strand in 1975 he got a job at the Eastside Bookstore on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place where he worked with the future owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop: Bob Contant, Terry McCoy, Peter Dargis, Tom Evans and Ross Lumpkin. It was during this period that Kolm experienced the highs and lows of the pre-gentrified East Village; incidents he later incorporated into his fiction. In 1979 he began working at New Morning Bookstore in Soho, at 169 Spring Street. When it became clear that New Morning was going to close, Ron landed a job at the original Coliseum Books on 57th Street; a position he stayed at for twenty years, with a four-year sabbatical in the mid-1980s, when he worked at St. Mark's Bookshop.