Anne Winters Biography

Anne Winters is the author of The Key to the City (1986), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Displaced of Capital (2004), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Her poems address issues of poverty, homelessness, social inequality, and the city of New York. Dan Chiasson described her poems as “Miltonic, Marxist, ornate, and indignant,” adding that “her real subject is finally how the loveliness of craft measures experience at its most brute and awful, and how experience ruptures even the loveliest of craft.” Concerning The Displaced of Capital, Ellen Nussbaum wrote that Winters “builds legacies to urban poverty that balance between lyricism and manifesto.”

Winters is fluent in French, and her translations include Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau (1979). She has traveled widely in Europe and was a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France. Her awards include grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.