Annie Finch

Photo by E. McCallan

Annie Finch was born on October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle, New York. Her mother was a poet and doll-artist, her father a scholar of philosophy and religion.

She studied poetry and poetry-writing at Yale, verse-drama with Ntozake Shange at the University of Houston 's graduate creative writing program, and earned a PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University. She currently directs the Stonecoast Masters of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine.

Finch’s books of poetry include Eve (Story Line,1997), Calendars (Tupelo , 2003), and The Encyclopedia of Scotland (Salt, 2004), as well as a translation of the Complete Poems of Louise Labé (Univ. of Chicago, 2005). Her musical collaborations include two opera librettos, “Lily Among the Goddesses” and “Marina,” based on the life of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, which premiered in New York in 2003.

Her writings on poetry have been collected in The Ghost of Meter (Univ. of Michigan, 1993) and The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (Univ. of Michigan, 2005). Finch has also edited several ground-breaking, popular anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes (Story Line,1994) and An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (Univ. of Michigan, 2002).

Uniting all of Finch’s work is a conception of poetry as essentially incantatory, performative, speaking to the body as much as to the mind. The themes of her poems draw upon earth-centered spirituality, myth, sex, and childbirth, and her poetry is inspired by the natural world, especially the landscapes of Maine, where she lives with her husband the environmentalist Glen Brand and their two children. She is currently finishing a poetry-writing textbook, A Poet's Craft, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

Visit Annie Finch's Website.