Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems, Paradise is Jagged, appeared from Terrapin Books in February 2023. Her sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Her fifth book, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). Her other books of poems are Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces, and the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. With Laura-Gray Street she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press early in 2013; a third edition appeared in January 2020. Ann and Laura-Gray have begun work on The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II, which will contain poems written since 2010 by poets who were not included in the first volume;it will appear from Trinity UP in 2025. 

Recent projects include “The expression of the world is infinite: The Ecoarts Issue,” a special issue of the University of Mississippi’s online journal Global South, available on Project Muse. This issue, which Ann coedited with Laura-Gray Street and with four regional coeditors, features poetry, prose, and visual art from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and the US South; the regional coeditors, respectively, are Mildred Barya, Esther Xueming, Juan Carlos Galeano, and Craig Santos Perez. Another recent project is a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert, titled “Into the chalice of your thoughts,” which will be exhibited at the Guadalajara Book Festival in November 2023 and published as a book with facing Spanish translations.

Ann’s poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, three Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and thirteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. She has received the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She has had residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, Camac/France, and Storyknife. A senior fellow and board member of Black Earth Institute, Ann was 2017 Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College.

Ann has had a senior Fulbright lectureship to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Uppsala University, Sweden. In 2006 she was President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She is newly retired from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi and teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio.