Annie Finch
| Annie Finch | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 31, 1956 New Rochelle, New York, USA |
| Occupation | poet, writer, librettist, translator |
| Genre | poetry |
| Notable works | Eve, Calendars, The Body of Poetry, Among the Goddesses, Spells: New and Selected Poems |
| Notable awards |
Robert Fitzgerald Award 2009 Sarasvati Award 2012 |
Annie Finch (born 1956, New Rochelle, New York) is an American poet and writer. Dictionary of Literary Biography names her "one of the central figures in contemporary American poetry" for her role, as poet and critic, in the contemporary reclamation of poetic meter and form. Finch earned a B.A.in English from Yale University, M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and Ph.D from Stanford University with a focus on poetry and prosody, and has been awarded the 1990 Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the art of versification. She has published eighteen books including poetry, poetics, and anthologies. A practitioner of earth-centered spirituality, Annie Finch considers the role of a metrical poet to be a sacred calling, writing in the preface of her selected poems that she considers her poems and verse plays to be "spells" that heal and raise consciousness through form, meter, and rhythm.
In "Desks," an autobiographical essay in 'The Body of Poetry', Finch describes her childhood in an eccentric intellectual and artistic family and claims that her mother's poetry and her father's library of literature, philosophy, and religion influenced her work. An interview in American Poetry Review describes how a year spent on a spiritual pilgrimage through Europe and the Middle East with her family at the age of six affected her sense of language as incantation. The year after graduating from Yale, Finch self-published and performed her first book of poetry, the experimental longpoem The Encyclopedia of Scotland, in 1982. She continued to pursue poetic theater in her MA program in creative writing at the University of Houston, where her thesis director was Ntozake Shange. Her doctoral studies at Stanford University focused on feminist literary theory, poetics, and cultural studies, culminating in the publication of her landmark essay "Dickinson and Patriarchal Meter: A Theory of Metrical Codes" in PMLA.
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