Anne Boyer

Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her poetry, essays, and books have been translated into numerous languages including Icelandic, Spanish, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Persian, and Swedish. 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.

Anne Boyer studied at Wichita State University and Salina High School South. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is literature, literary activity and poetry. Places of work recorded in the authority are Kansas City. Employment is recorded with Kansas City Art Institute. Works named in the authority record are The Undying, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and Garments Against Women. Distinctions recorded are Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

• Born — 1973 • Birthplace — Topeka, Kansas • Education — * Kansas State University (BA) • Wichita State University (MFA) • Genres — essay, memoir, poetry • Awards — * Whiting Award for Nonfiction, Poetry (2018) • Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2020) • Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction (2020)

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1973 and grew up in Salina, Kansas where she was educated in public schools. She earned a BA in English literature from Kansas State University in 1996 and an MFA in poetry from Wichita State University in 1997. She has taught at the University of St Andrews since 2023, 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, and in 2023 she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Her diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer has become the subject of her current work, examining the intersection of social class and medical care. 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. In 2018, she also won the Whiting Award in Nonfiction/Poetry. In March 2020, Boyer was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. 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 Gaza 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.".

• Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse. Effing Press, 2006. • Selected Dreams with a note on Phrenology. Dusie, 2007. • The Romance of Happy Workers. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2008. • Art is War. Lawrence, Kansas: Mitzvah Chaps, 2008. • The 2000s: A history of the future in advance of itself. 2009. • My Common Heart. Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011 • A Form of Sabotage. 2013. • Garments Against Women. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2015. • A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018. • Money City Sick as Fuck. London: Materials, 2019. • The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.