Anne Boyer

Last updated
Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer Portrait.jpg
Portrait of Anne Boyer
Born1973 (age 5051)
Topeka, Kansas
Education
Genres
Notable awards

Anne Boyer (born 1973) is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The 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] and The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (2019). [6]

Contents

In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry 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 in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the University 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, and Miyo Vestrini.

In 2020, Boyer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care . [9]

Life and career

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1973 and grew up in Salina, Kansas where she was educated in public schools. [10] She earned a BA in English literature from Kansas State University in 1996 and an MFA in poetry from Wichita State University in 1997. [11] She has taught at the University of St Andrews since 2023, [12] having previously taught at the Kansas City Art Institute (2007-2023) and Drake University (2005-2007). In 2018-2019 she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge, [13] and in 2023 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins 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 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and her book Garments Against Women won the 2016 Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award in poetry. She was also named "The Best Writer in Kansas City" by The Pitch. [16] In 2018, she also won the Whiting Award in Nonfiction/Poetry. [17]

In March 2020, Boyer was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. [18]

She resigned from her role as the poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine in November 2023, in protest at the newspaper's coverage of the 2023 Israel-Hamas 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]

Critical reception

Boyer's 2015 book Garments Against Women spent six months at the top of the Small 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 at The Rumpus described it as "widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir." [22]

Garments Against Women was described by Publishers 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 as Jean-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]

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carol Shields</span> Canadian writer

Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard Nemerov</span> American poet

Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gwendolyn Brooks</span> American writer (1917–2000)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Glück</span> American poet and Nobel laureate (1943–2023)

Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon Olds</span> American poet

Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

Undying can refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Oliver</span> American poet (1935–2019)

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by sincere wonderment and profound connection with the environment, conveyed in unadorned language and simple yet striking imagery. In 2007, she was declared the country's best-selling poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Randall</span> American poet

Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets”, her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Gilbert</span> American poet and writer 1925-2012

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a "serious romantic." Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natasha Trethewey</span> American poet

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliza Griswold</span> American writer

Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2011 Pulitzer Prize</span>

The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, April 18, 2011. The Los Angeles Times won two prizes, including the highest honor for Public Service. The New York Times also won two awards. No prize was handed out in the Breaking News category. The Wall Street Journal won an award for the first time since 2007. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad picked up the Fiction prize after already winning the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award. Photographer Carol Guzy of The Washington Post became the first journalist to win four Pulitzer Prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kelly Cherry</span> American writer and poet laureate (1940–2022)

Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willa Schneberg</span> American poet (born 1952)

Willa Hope Schneberg is an American poet. She has published five full-length poetry collections, including In The Margins Of The World, winner of the 2002 Oregon Book Award; Box Poems ; Storytelling In Cambodia ; Rending the Garment ; and The Naked Room. The letterpress chapbook, The Books of Esther, was produced in conjunction with her interdisciplinary exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. The Naked Room was released in 2023.

Angel's Bone is an opera by composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek in one act that follows the plight of two angels discovered on earth who are forced into spiritual and sexual slavery at the hands of a financially troubled couple. The work is a contemporary parable that explores the dark effects behind modern-day slavery, and human trafficking and probes the psyche of traffickers. Du Yun draws her inspiration from a range of musical genres – from classical to punk to the cabaret.

<i>The End of the Myth</i> 2019 book by Greg Grandin

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is a book written by Greg Grandin, which won 2020's Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, on the role of the frontier from the American Revolution to the presidential election of 2016.

Daniela Seel is a German poet, translator, editor and publisher.

<i>The Undying</i> (book) 2019 non-fiction book by Anne Boyer

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a 2019 non-fiction book by the American author, poet, and essayist, Anne Boyer. The memoir chronicles Boyer's experience as a breast cancer patient. Boyer takes an untraditional approach to the standard illness narrative, by weaving together her personal journey as a patient in treatment with reflections on art and literature, and critiques of capitalism and the medical industry.

References

  1. Boyer, Anne, 1973- (2008). The romance of happy workers : poetry. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. ISBN   9781566892148. OCLC   181730502.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  2. "anneboyerthetwothousands | Poetry". Scribd. Retrieved 2019-06-10.
  3. Boyer, Anne. My Common Heart (PDF).
  4. "Anne Boyer : The Poetry Foundation". www.poetryfoundation.org. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  5. Boyer, Anne, 1973- (2018). A handbook of disappointed fate (First ed.). Brooklyn, NY. ISBN   978-1937027926. OCLC   1024158306.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. Boyer, Anne (2019). 'The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care'. New York City, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN   9780374279349 . Retrieved 16 March 2024.
  7. Foundation, Poetry. "Tender Theory". Harriet: The Blog. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  8. "St Andrews Faculty Page" . Retrieved 16 March 2024.
  9. "The Pulitzer Prizes".
  10. "Elective Affinities: Anne Boyer" . Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  11. "Faculty: Anne Boyer, M.F.A." Kansas City Art Institute . Archived from the original on 2023-06-03. Retrieved 2023-11-16.
  12. "St Andrews Faculty Page" . Retrieved 16 March 2024.
  13. "Poetry Fellow - Judith E. Wilson Centre for Poetics". University of Cambridge. Retrieved 16 March 2024.
  14. "Hollins Welcomes Pulitzer Prize Winner Anne Boyer As This Year's Writer-in-Residence". Hollins University. Retrieved 16 March 2024.
  15. "Current Project: On Care". Anne Boyer. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  16. "About". Anne Boyer. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  17. "2018 Whiting Award Winners Announced". AWP Writer. 2024-08-11. Archived from the original on 2024-08-11. Retrieved 2024-08-11.
  18. Flood, Alison (2020-03-19). "Eight authors share $1m prize as writers face coronavirus uncertainty". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2020-03-20.
  19. "Read Anne Boyer's extraordinary New York Times resignation letter". Literary Hub. 2023-11-16. Retrieved 2023-11-16.
  20. "Anne Boyer". Anne Boyer. Archived from the original on 2016-02-18. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  21. Mclane, Maureen N. (2015-12-24). "Anne Boyer's 'Garments Against Women'". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  22. Foundation, Poetry. "'Literature is against us': In Conversation with Anne Boyer". Harriet: The Blog. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  23. "Garments Against Women". Publishers Weekly. Archived from the original on 2016-03-15. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  24. "The Undying". Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2020-03-17.