Anne Boyer | |
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 Portrait of Anne Boyer | |
| Born | 1973 (age 52–53) Topeka, Kansas |
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Anne Boyer (born 1973) is anAmerican poet and essayist. She is the author ofThe Romance of Happy Workers (2008),[1]The 2000s (2009),[2]My Common Heart (2011),[3]Garments Against Women (2015),[4]The Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018),[5] andThe Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019).[6]
In 2016, she was a featured blogger at thePoetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets.[7] Her essays about illness have appeared inGuernica,The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at theUniversity of St Andrews in Scotland.[8]
Her poetry, essays, and books have been translated into numerous languages including Icelandic, Spanish, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Persian, and Swedish. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, andMiyo Vestrini.
In 2020, Boyer was awarded thePulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her bookThe Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.[9]
Anne Boyer was born inTopeka, Kansas in 1973 and grew up inSalina, Kansas where she was educated in public schools.[10] She earned a BA in English literature fromKansas State University in 1996 and an MFA in poetry fromWichita State University in 1997.[11] She has taught at theUniversity of St Andrews since 2023,[12] having previously taught at theKansas City Art Institute (2007-2023) andDrake University (2005-2007). In 2018-2019 she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at theUniversity of Cambridge,[13] and in 2023 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence atHollins University.[14] Her diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer has become the subject of her current work, examining the intersection of social class and medical care.[15]
Boyer is the winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from theFoundation for Contemporary Arts, and her bookGarments Against Women won the 2016Community of Literary Magazines and PressesFirecracker Award in poetry. She was also named "The Best Writer in Kansas City" byThe Pitch.[16] In 2018, she also won theWhiting Award in Nonfiction/Poetry.[17]
In March 2020, Boyer was awarded theWindham-Campbell Literature Prize.[18]
She resigned from her role as the poetry editor ofThe New York Times Magazine in November 2023, in protest at the newspaper's coverage of theGaza war. In her resignation letter, she wrote "the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone" and that she "won’t write about poetry amid the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.".[19]
Boyer's 2015 bookGarments Against Women spent six months at the top of theSmall Press Distribution's best seller list in poetry.[20]The New York Times called it "a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of life and literature itself."[21]
Chris Stroffolino atThe Rumpus described it as "widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir."[22]
Garments Against Women was described byPublishers Weekly as a book that "faces the material and philosophical problems of writing—and by extension, living—in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse asJean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted."[23]
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care tied for winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[24]
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