Born in Washington D.C., raised in Virginia, and now a UK citizen, Anne Rouse read history at the University of London. She worked as both a medical and mental health nurse and for a mental health charity. She was also a trade union activist and health campaigner before becoming a freelance writer. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and periodicals, including the Guardian, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, and in the US, The Atlantic and Poetry.
Her first two collections, Sunset Grill and Timing, were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. The Upshot: New and Selected Poems, was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2008. She’s read her work or led workshops at venues from the Almeida Theatre to Tate Modern. She’s been a Hawthornden Fellow, and was the Royal Literary Fund Visiting Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2000-2002, St Mary’s College, Queens University, Belfast 2004-2005, and the Courtauld Institute, London, 2008, and has been an RLF Project Fellow at Tate Modern.
Rouse has also collaborated with the composer Morgan Hayes, the artist Emily Johns, and the artist and graphic designer Erica Smith. She lives in East Sussex.
Anne Rouse’s new book Ox-Eye will be published in the summer of 2022 by Bloodaxe Books.