About Laure-Anne

Appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara in 2019, Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium where she worked for Belgian and Luxembourg Radio and Television. She studied Acting and Elocution from the Brussels Conservatory and an M.F.A. in Theater Arts from the Institut National des Arts des Spectacles (National Institute for the Performing Arts) in Brussels, Belgium. She taught French Poetry at the International School of Brussels.

A graduate from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she taught poetry workshops for the Writers in the Schools program in Colorado, and co-directed the Aspen Writers’ Conference from 1989 to 1992. Among other publications, her poems were published in Ploughshares, Ohio Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, AGNI, and The Washington Post as well as in numerous anthologies. Garrison Keillor has read four of her poems on N.P.R’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Her first collection in English, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, was published by BOA Editions. Her second book of poems, Small Gods of Grief, also published by BOA Editions, won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, Laure-Anne’s third poetry collection was selected as an ALA Notable Book, was published by Ausable Books and can be ordered from Copper Canyon Press.

She taught poetry workshops at Emerson College, at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, and at many conferences such as Catskill Poetry Workshops, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Frost Place Poetry Festival. She was awarded a Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and was a Writer in Residence at The Vermont Studio Center and at Hamilton College, New York. She was the McEver Chair for Visiting Writers at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia. With her husband, poet Kurt Brown, Laure-Anne co-edited Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars. She is the editor of Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades as well as Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City, all from Milkweed Editions. Her latest anthology, Never Before: Poems about First Experiences was published by Four Way Books. She is currently translating American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English. In 2006, the Field Translation Series from Oberlin College Press published The Plural of Happiness, Selected Poems by Herman de Coninck, translated from the Dutch by Laure-Anne and Kurt Brown. She taught at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, and is part of the Founding Faculty of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College in Boston, MA. She teaches at the SunJune Literary Collaborative.