Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Anne Boyer is a Kansas City-based poet and essayist, and a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her works include The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2006), My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011), and the 2016 CLMP Firecracker award-winning Garments Against Women (US: Ahsahta Press, 2015; UK: Mute Books, 2016), which Maureen McLane described in the New York Times as “a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of literature and of life itself.”
Boyer’s poetry has been translated into a number of languages, including Icelandic, Spanish, Persian, and Swedish, and her chapbook A Form of Sabotage (2013) was published by the collective Kült Neşriyat in Turkish translation. Boyer’s other chapbooks include Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse, Art is War, and The 2000s. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini.
In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with highly-aggressive triple negative breast cancer which led to her work on the politics of care in the age of precarity. Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. According to critic Chris Strofollino, Boyer’s work “widens the boundaries of poetry and memoir as we know them.”