Biographical Sketch

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 began writing poetry at an early age and continued to write and to focus on poetry and poetry writing at Oakwood Friends School, Simon's Rock Early College, and at Yale, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1979. 

After college, Finch travelled in Africa and Europe, then lived in New York where she published her first chapbook, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, a transcription of a performance poem for voices, costumes, and bagpipe in strongly rhythmical free verse.

From 1983 to 1986, she attended the University of Houston 's graduate creative writing program, writing a thesis of verse drama under the direction of Ntozake Shange. From 1986 to 1990, she earned a PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University. Her dissertation, written under the direction of feminist literary scholar Diane Middlebrook, was later published as The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse.  At Stanford, she also edited the literary magazine Sequoia, became involved in the performance poetry scene in San Francisco, and wrote and directed verse plays including “The Moon and the Snake” (1989) and “Life by the Ocean” (1990).

Finch took her first academic job as poet-in-residence and assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa from 1992-1995. During these years, she published two influential books on formal poetics, The Ghost of Meter (1993) and the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes (1994).  She also continued writing poetry based on the dramatic, vocal qualities of words, and on archetypal female spirituality. In 1995, Finch left Northern Iowa for a position at Miami University of Ohio, and in 1997, she published her first collection of poetry, Eve. The collection is divided into nine sections, each introduced by a poem to a different goddess drawn from a variety of traditions and cultures across both time and space.   Eve was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and the Great Lakes Award. Supporting and inspiring her work as a poet with creative editing and thinking about poetry, Finch has since published further books on poetics including The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (Univ. of Michigan, 2005) and anthologies including An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art ( Univ. of Michigan, 2002) and Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form (Wordtech, 2008). She now coedits the venerable Poets on Poetry series at the University of Michigan Press with Marilyn Hacker.  In 1997, she founded the international listserv WOM-PO (Discussion of Women's Poetry listserv).

In 2004, Finch moved with her family to Maine to become the Director of the Stonecoast MFA, a low-residency graduate program in Creative Writing based at the University of Southern Maine. Her recent books include a translation of the complete poems of French Renaissance poet Louise Labé and two new books of poetry. Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003, shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award) is a collection of lyrics on mortality, human relationships and nature including several ritual chants for different seasons, an elegy, and an epitathalamium.  Among the Goddesses (Red Hen, 2009) consists of the epic poem “Marie Moving,” written in dactyls and telling the mythic tale of a woman undergoing a rape, an abortion, and a spiritual apprenticeship to seven different goddesses, and a libretto version of the same story with music by Deborah Drattell.  Finch’s early book of poetry The Encyclopedia of Scotland was reprinted by the innovative British publisher Salt in 2004.