Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer (born 1973 in Topeka, Kansas) is an American poet and visual artist. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers (2008), The 2000s (2009) My Common Heart (2011) and Garments Against Women (2015). In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets. Boyer teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute with the poets Cyrus Console and Jordan Stempleman.

Anne Boyer was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1973 and grew up in Salina, Kansas where she was educated in its public schools and libraries. In 2014, while teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, she was diagnosed with a highly aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Her diagnosis and treatment has become the subject of her current work, examining the intersection of social class and medical care.

Boyer's 2015 book Garments Against Women spent months at the top of the Small Press Distribution's best seller list in poetry. The New York Times called it "a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of life and literature itself."

Chris Stroffolino at The Rumpus described it as "widening the boundaries of poetry and memoir."

Garments Against Women was described by Publisher's Weekly as a book that "faces the material and philosophical problems of writing--and by extension, living--in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted."