Ann Townsend ’85

Ann Townsend is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Denison University. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Dime Store Erotics (1998), The Coronary Garden (2005), and Dear Delinquent (2019), and is the editor of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007), with David Baker. She is currently at work on a collection of essays on poetry, translation, and the natural world. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and many others. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, she has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bernheim Arboretum, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. In 2016 she, along with co-founders Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, accepted the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, given in recognition of their work for the larger literary community. At Denison, Townsend teaches courses in creative writing, 20th-century poetry and poetics, literary translation, and the history of the lyric poem. She also has taught at the Antioch Writers Workshop, The Catskills Workshop, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and in the MFA program at Carlow University.