Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer (born 1973 in Topeka , Kansas ) is an American author , poet and essayist . In 2020 she received a Pulitzer Prize .

Career

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka , Kansas in 1973 and grew up in Salina , Kansas. There she attended school and studied creative writing at Wichita State University .

She has been a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2011 . She teaches there with authors such as Cyrus Console and Jordan Stempleman .

In 2016 she was a blogger for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, for which she wrote a series of blog entries about the diagnosis and treatment of her breast cancer. In doing so, she was referring to other authors who have died of breast cancer, such as Kathy Acker and Audre Lorde .

Since her breast cancer diagnosis in 2015, Boyer has been writing more and more about cancer as a disease that must be understood within a medical system that is part of a capitalist, patriarchal, and racist system:

"The system of medicine is, for the sick, a visible scene of action, but beyond it are all the other systems, family race work culture gender money education, and beyond those is a system that appears to include all the other systems, the system so total and overwhelming that we often mistake it for the world. […] This system we mistake for everything resides in a system-containing object like a tumor inside a system-containing object like a cancer patient who is a system-containing object inside a clinic, all of it also containing these systems of history. "

Boyer sees herself as a Marxist and a feminist . In an interview with Believer magazine , she describes herself as a communist and speaks of not believing the "lie of property":

"I am definitely a communist. I believe that the world should be for the people and we should hold the world in common because it already is a common world. We shouldn't believe the lie of property. Eight people own the same amount of money as the poorest half of the world does, but in fact they don't own it; it's ours. It's labor that creates the world, and the people who think they have it have it wrongly. "

Awards

• 2020: Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

Publications (selection)

She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers (2008), The 2000s (2009), My Common Heart (2011), Garments Against Women (2015), The Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2015), and The Undying (2019). Her texts have been translated into numerous languages, including Icelandic, Spanish, Persian and Swedish. Together with Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated texts by Venezuelan authors such as Victor Malera Mora, Miguel James and Miyo Vestrini.

• The Romance of Happy Workers . Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota 2008, ISBN 9781566892148
• Garments Against Women. Ahsahta Press, Boise, Idaho 2015, ISBN 9781934103593
• A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, New York 2018, ISBN 9781937027926
• The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York 2019, ISBN 9780374279349

reception

Garments Against Women

Boyer's poetry book Garments Against Women , which appeared in 2015, topped the Small Press Distribution bestseller list for poetry for six months . The New York Times described the volume as "a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of life and literature itself."

Chris Stroffolino described the book in The Rumpus as "widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir."

The Undying

The literary scholar and queer theorist Lauren Berlant describes the form of Boyers The Undying as follows:

“'Breast cancer is a disease that presents itself as a disordering question of form,' writes poet and essayist Anne Boyer. Form of what? Of testimony? Of exposure? Of vulnerability? Of injury? Of care? Of identity? Of time? Yes yes yes: no genres of life and art are spared by cancer or this book. All appear in The Undying as disordered forms, gestures of partial efficacy, disturbed by chronic illness. Neither a form of life, exactly, nor a form of death, the breast cancer this book makes visceral takes on the shape of something lenticular, smudged like the present that's defined by crises that are the effects of so many causes. The Undying multiplies the befores, durings, and afters of active-duty precarity. "

Boyer received the Pulitzer Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book in 2020 for The Undying . From the laudation:

"An elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America."

Individual evidence

1. ^ Poetry Foundation: Harriet. February 20, 2020, accessed on February 20, 2020 . 
2. ↑ About - Anne Boyer. March 4, 2016, accessed February 20, 2020 . 
3. ^ Anne Boyer: The Undying . 1st edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2019, ISBN 978-0-374-27934-9 , pp. 60 .
4. ↑ An interview with Anne Boyer. October 1, 2019, accessed February 20, 2020 (American English). 
5. ↑ An interview with Anne Boyer. October 1, 2019, accessed February 20, 2020 (American English). 
6. ^ Anne Boyer: The romance of happy workers: poetry . Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2008, ISBN 978-1-56689-214-8 ( worldcat.org [accessed February 20, 2020]).
7. ^ Anne Boyer: A handbook of disappointed fate . 2018, ISBN 978-1-937027-92-6 ( worldcat.org [accessed February 20, 2020]).
8. ^ The Undying | Anne Boyer | Macmillan. Retrieved February 20, 2020 (American English). 
9. ^ Poetry Foundation: Anne Boyer. February 20, 2020, accessed on February 20, 2020 . 
10. ^ Maureen N. McLane: Anne Boyer's 'Garments Against Women' . In: The New York Times . December 24, 2015, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 20, 2020]).
11. ^ Poetry Foundation: 'Literature is against us': In Conversation with Anne Boyer by Amy King. February 20, 2020, accessed on February 20, 2020 . 
12. ↑ Lauren Berlant: The Undying. Retrieved February 20, 2020 . 
13. ↑ The 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction. In: pulitzer.org. May 4, 2020, accessed on May 4, 2020 .