Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann is the Mississippi Poet Laureate for the term 2025-2029. Her eighth book of poems, Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert and translations of the poems into Spanish by the Women in Translation collective (U Guadalajara Press, 2023). 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). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Ann has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden; a Fulbright Specialist Award to lecture on ecopoetry at Cappadocia University, Turkey, was cancelled by the current State Department. She has had residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, The Mesa Refuge, and Camac. She has 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, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. Also she taught yoga at Southern Star in Oxford for many years. She lives with her husband Peter Wirth in Oxford.