Bio

Ann Fisher-Wirth is Mississippi Poet Laureate for 2025-2029. Her tenth book of poems, For What Is, Praise: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in the Silver Concho Poetry Series of Press 53. Her ninth book, This Moment Between Time / Este instante, entre tiempos and her eighth book, In the Chalice of Your Thoughts / Des tus pensamientos, el cáliz, are both poetry/photography collaborations with Wilfried Raussert and translations of the poems into Spanish by the Women in Translation collective (U Guadalajara Press, 2023 and kipu/Verlag, 2027). Her seventh book is Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023), and her fifth, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013) and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2025), which was a Silver Medalist in this year’s IPBA awards. A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Ann has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, The Mesa Refuge, and Camac. She received the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission, as well as three Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowships, the MS Institute of Arts Poetry Award, the Rita Dove Prize, and 16 Pushcart nominations. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program.

Recent Honors

  • Mississippi Poet Laureate, 2025-2029
  • Awarded two-week residency, Studio Faire, Sanac, France, for October 2025; postponed until May 2027.
  • Mississippi Arts Commission Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry, 2023.
  • Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, 2022-2023.
  • Invited keynote speaker for Annual English Graduate Student Association Mardi Gras Graduate Conference, February 2022.,
  • Awarded month-long residency at Storyknife Women Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska, October 2022.
  • William Winter Faculty Fellow for Natchez Literary and Film Festival, 2021.
  • Honorable Mention, Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York, for “at the mississippi civil rights museum,” Southern Humanities Review, 2019.
  • Senior Fellow, Board and Steering Committee Membership, Black Earth Institute, 2018-present.