Annie Finch - Biography

Biography

Annie Finch was born on October 31, 1956 in New Rochelle, New York. Her maternal great-aunt, Jessie Wallace Hughan, was a founder of the War Resisters League. Her mother was a poet and doll artist. Her father was a scholar of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a conscientious objector, and a professor of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter College. In the introduction to The Body of Poetry, Finch claims that her parents met at a lecture by Auden, and her essay "Desks" describes the influences of her father's book collection and her mother's example as a poet.

Finch graduated from Oakwood Friends' School, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1973 and then studied filmmaking, art history, and poetry at Bard College at Simon's Rock before earning her B.A. in English Literature at Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1979.

In 1983 she performed and self-published an excerpt from her first book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, in New York (it would be published in full in 2005 by the British house Salt Publishing). The same year she enrolled in the M.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where her M.A. thesis consisted of three verse dramas written under the supervision of playwright Ntozake Shange. She married Glen Brand, who moved with her to California where she enrolled in the graduate program in English and American literature at Stanford University. While living in the San Francisco area, Finch produced, directed, and acted in short poetic plays and worked with Bob Holman on Poets Theater. She completed her dissertation under the direction of literary scholar and Anne Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook and earned her PhD in 1990.

Finch's work first found a national audience in 1997 with the publication of Eve from Story Line Press, reissued by the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Classics Poetry Series in 2010. Her next book, Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), was shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year. In 2010, Tupelo released an audio version and Readers Guide to Calendars. Finch's "narrative libretto" Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams, a combination opera libretto and epic poem focusing on abortion and goddess-centered spirituality, was published by Red Hen Press in 2010. Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) arranges Finch's poetry in chronological order for the first time, including a selection of her unpublished "lost poems" from the late 1980s.

Finch's opera Marina, based on the life of poet Marina Tsvetaeva, was produced by American Opera Projects in 2003 with music by Deborah Drattell. In 2010, with director Assunta Kent, she founded Poets Theater of Maine in Portland, Maine.

Finch and her husband, an environmental organizer, have two children. In 2004 they moved to Maine, where she is currently Director of Stonecoast MFA Program, the low-residency MFA in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine.