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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Writer, Oakland, California

Holtzbrinck Fellow - Class of Spring 2019


Anne Finger, based in Oakland, CA, is a writer of creative nonfiction and fiction. She earned her BA at Harvard University, and MA at Stanford University. In 2016, Finger was the Kate Welling Distinguished Scholar in Disability Studies at Miami University; she has also taught at Wayne State University and the University of Texas at Austin. A polio survivor, Finger is an activist for the disabled, and has written about her disability in Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin’s, 2006) and Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth (Seal, 1990). Her award-winning short-story collection Call Me Ahab (University of Nebraska, 2009) imagines disability in the lives of many real and literary figures. Finger is also the author of the novels A Woman, in Bed (Cinco Puntos, 2018) and Bone Truth (Coffee House, 1994). Her short fiction has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Discourse, Feminist Studies, Antioch Review, and Ploughshares, and she has held residencies at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, New Pacific Studios (New Zealand), Yaddo, Djerassi, Centrum, and Hedgebrook, among others. Finger was on the advisory council of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and is a former president of the Society for Disability Studies and AXIS Dance Company.

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