Anne Carson is a classicist, author, and poet. She holds appointments in the departments of classics, comparative literature, and English at the University of Michigan.

Carson’s writings frequently conflate the borders of publishing categories, as references to such genres as ancient Greek literature infuse her poetry, her critical essays, and sometimes appear in her verse. Her books include Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986), which traces desire and the erotic in Sappho’s fragments through other classical and philological texts; Economy of the Unlost (Princeton, 1999), which reads Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan; Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005), a collection of literary criticism in prose and verse; and Grief Lessons (Random House, 2006), a translation of four plays by Euripides. Her poetic works include Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Knopf, 1988); Men in the Off Hours (Knopf, 2000); and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Knopf, 2001). Carson has produced two book-length translations from ancient Greek verse: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2003) and Sophocles’ Electra (Oxford, 2001).

Praise for Carson’s work includes the Lannan Award for Poetry, the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Carson earned her PhD in Classics at the University of Toronto and has held positions at McGill University, Emory University, Princeton University, and the University of Calgary.