Background

Anne Boyer was born in 1973 in Topeka, Kansas, United States. As a child, she loved reading very much.

Education

Anne Boyer graduated from Salina High School South in 1991. Then she went to Kansas State University and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1996. A year later, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Wichita State University.

Career

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist whose work explores the possibilities of literature as an instrument for thinking about experiences often excluded from literature, particularly those that gather around gender, class, labor, and illness. She is the author of Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse (2006), Selected Dreams with a Note on Phrenology (2007), The Romance of Happy Workers (2008), My Common Heart (2011), and Garments Against Women (2015). Her work has appeared in The Poker, Denver Quarterly, The Canary, Painted Bride Quarterly, Guernica, Fullstop, The New Inquiry, and Mute Magazine. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018) is a collection of essays and fables about poetry, love, death, and other impossible questions. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th-century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini.

Written after Boyer's diagnosis with highly aggressive cancer and in its disabling aftermath, her recent book The Undying (2019) is a meditation upon cancer, care, and what it means to be sick inside of information's dream - our data-saturated moment in history. She shares her true story of coping with cancer, both the illness and the industry. She was also a blogger for Poetry Foundation in 2016 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. That same year, Boyer was the featured blogger for Harriet. With K. Silem Mohammad, she was a founding editor of the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln.

In addition to her writing career, Anne Boyer is an Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her teaching areas include experimental writing, aesthetics, gender studies, and digital culture. Boyer has been teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2007. Before coming to the Kansas City Art Institute, she taught creative writing and literature in the English department at Drake University in Des Moines. She is the 2018–2019 Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at Cambridge University and a visiting poetry fellow at Peterhouse.

Achievements

• Boyer is a recipient of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award, Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Whiting Award in Nonfiction/Poetry. She was also named The Best Writer in Kansas City by The Pitch. Her poetry has been translated into numerous languages including Icelandic, Spanish, Persian, and Swedish.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Romance of Happy Workers

    (The Romance of Happy Workers swaggers through a world of ...)

    2008
  • A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

    (A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of An...)

    2018
  • The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

    (A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet...)

    2019
  • Garments Against Women

    (Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose ab...)

    2015

Views

Anne Boyer considers poetry a practical form of self-expression that fits into the rhythms of daily life.

Her numerous favorite authors are Stephanie Young, Lauren Levin, Brandon Brown, Joshua Clover, David Lau, CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock, Carlos Soto-Roman, Jenn McCreary, Rod Smith, Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, Mel Nichols, Susana Gardner, Dana Ward, Sandra Simonds, Mathew Timmons, Fred Moten, Guillermo Parra, Cyrus Console, Megan Kaminski, Ben Friedlander, Boyd Nielson, Josef Kaplan, Anselm Berrigan, Lisa Robertson, Bernadette Mayer, Diane di Prima, Victor Valera Mora, Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, and other.

Quotations: "I’ve always just loved to read. I was one of those kids who couldn’t get enough out of a book. So I knew I was going to be a writer of some sort or an artist. I started out studying both, but poetry was cheaper."

"Poetry tends to be more self-directed - it comes from my particular need to engage the world on my terms. It’s a more intimate and personal mode of expression. An essay is part of a larger conversation with other people."

"There is no separating art and politics. And poets have to respond to the world that they’re in. So my poetry is political, but it’s not only that."

"When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death."

"My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward."

"I write because I care about major questions and minor experiences, how history arranges feelings, space, and minutes, and also how our material circumstances and embodied particularities influence the ways we give these shape."

"Poetry is good to remember the dead, to vanquish our enemies, and to woo unlikely lovers."