Anne Myles
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho’s Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and have been nominated for multiple Pushcart awards. She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, a PhD from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Raised in Manhattan and New York’s Hudson Valley, she presently lives with her pets in Greensboro, North Carolina.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I think Jewishness for me is tied to the mysteries of identity, and it is those mysteries I am most driven to explore in writing. What does it mean to be who I am; how did being Jewish shape my childhood and (mostly secular) upbringing, and the unspoken mysteries of my parents’ lives? What unknown women came before me in my lost Askhenazi heritage, and what would they make of me—queer, unpartnered, non-observant? The presence of anti-Semitism also recurs as a theme in my poems to a degree that surprises me, as I grapple with traces of what seems to be epigenetic fear and think about moving through a mostly non-Jewish world with my Jewish face. Jewishness and queerness are not the sum of the otherness I recurrently explore, but they are integral parts of it.
Published Works
Late Epistle (Headmistress Press, 2023)
What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Education
Bryn Mawr College, B.A.
Vermont College of Fine Arts, M.F.A.
University of Chicago, PhD