A poet and musician, the late Allen Ginsberg said "Marc Olmstead inherited Burroughs' scientific nerve & Kerouac's movie-minded line nailed down with gold eyebeam in San Francisco." Olmsted teaches the on-line course “WRITING KEROUAC/SITTING BUDDHA: Spontaneous Poetics & Big Mind” at Writers.com and has lectured at Naropa University and U.C. Berkeley.