Ron Kolm (born 1947) 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. During this period he became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the "Downtown" scene of the 1970s and 80s. In 1985, Kolm co-founded the Unbearables, a loose collective of poets and artists who took their name from a short story by Mike Golden. Historian Robert Siegle describes Kolm as "an editor and facilitator for magazines and presses as well as a writer of fiction and poetry" who "carried boxes of little magazines around to bookstores, passed around copies of new work, and connected people" in general, noting that "wherever we look along the networks that hold together the diverse creative talents who constitute this cultural revolution, we find Kolm."
