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Ann Lauterbach grew up in New York City and studied literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; she continued to study literature at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She moved to London where she worked in publishing and in the art world for seven years. When she returned to Manhattan, Lauterbach worked in art galleries until she began her long career as a teacher of literature, visual art, and writing; she has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Princeton University, the City College of New York, and has been a visiting art critic at the Yale Graduate School of the Arts. Currently, she lives in Germantown, N.Y., where she is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College and co-Chair of Writing in Bard’s MFA Program. She is the author of many books of poetry, including Under the Sign (2013); Or to Begin Again (2009), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Hum (2005); If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000 (2001); On a Stair (1997); And for Example (1994); Clamor (1991); Before Recollection (1987); and Many Times, but Then (1979). Lauterbach has collaborated with many artists on books and written extensively about art; she is also the author of three books of prose: Saint Petersburg Notebook (2014), The Given and the Chosen (2011), and The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2008). The recipient of many awards, Lauterbach has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation; additionally, in 2012 she was named the Sherry Distinguished Poet at the University of Chicago. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish and French.
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Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
Fiction
“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.
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