Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a scholar trained in the classics who has developed an independent voice as both a poet and an essayist. Carson’s work fuses classical topics with a unique and thoroughly modern style and sensibility. Her books, Glass, Irony, and God (1995) and Plainwater (2000), draw on literary materials ranging from the works of Emily Bronte and Gertrude Stein to medieval Japanese pilgrimage accounts and the poetry of ancient Greeks such as Mimnermus, Alcaeus, and Sappho. Men in the Off Hours (2001) is a collection of lyric essays and poems in which she collapses the ancient into the modern, bringing together such figures as Thucydides and Virginia Woolf in discussions of warfare. Carson is the author and translator of numerous other works of poetry and prose, most recently being If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (translator, 2002), The Mirror of Simple Souls (2003), and Answer Scars (2004). Carson is a professor in the Departments of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, and English at the University of Michigan. Carson earned a B.A. (1974), an M.A. (1975), and a Ph.D. (1981) from the University of Toronto. She received a diploma in classics (1976) from the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland.