Hum (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Ann Lauterbach was born on September 28, 1942, in New York City. Both of her parents were active in leftist politics. Her father was a reporter for Life magazine and head of the Moscow bureau of Time magazine during World War II. He died of polio when Lauterbach was eight, after which her mother retreated into alcoholism. These early events profoundly affected Lauterbach; she came to see poetry and art as ways of lending meaning to her life and connecting with other people. Toward that end, she attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City, from which she graduated in 1960. After earning an English degree from the University of Wisconsin and spending a year as a graduate student at Columbia University, she moved to London, where she immersed herself in the vibrant art scene of the late 1960s. There, her crowning triumph was organizing a poetry conference featuring John Ashbery, who even then was considered a titan of the poetry world, as the keynote speaker. Lauterbach credits Ashbery as being a major influence on her work.

After seven years in England, Lauterbach returned to the United States in 1974 and worked at a series of art galleries in New York's up-and-coming Soho district. In those days, artists, poets, and musicians populated the same countercultural milieu. Lauterbach's poetry was especially influenced by visual artists, particularly the abstract expressionists, whose nonrepresentational paintings often became the inspiration for her poems. In 1979, she published her first significant book of poetry, Many Times, but Then, which was well received by critics.

In addition to three residencies at the prestigious Yaddo writers' community in the 1980s, Lauterbach also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts. In 1989, she became the Theodore Goodman Professor of Creative Writing at City College at the City University of New York, and in 1993 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Her other poetry collections include Sacred Weather (1984), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), and On a Stair (1997). In 2005, she published The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, a collection of essays on contemporary poetry that she wrote in the late 1990s for the American Poetry Review. The same year, she also published Hum, a collection of poems inspired by art, music, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which a critic for Publishers Weekly said reads like "a chorus of angels."