Poet Anne Haven McDonnell writes poems that blur the boundaries of human perception, follow paths of science that spiral into mystery, and question how to grieve and wonder in this precarious time of ecological collapse.
Her first chapbook, Living with Wolves, is drawn from experience and research in an island community in British Columbia as they try to learn co-existence with wolves. The poems in her first full-length collection, Breath on a Coal, offer an ecopoetics of queerness and explore the death of beloveds, unraveling in the natural world, and sustenance found in wild places.
A 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry allowed McDonnell to take a semester leave from her faculty position at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
While at MacDowell, she finished her second full-length collection of poems. These poems engage with fungi and lichen, animals, and human identity as related to other-than-human beings, all in the shadow of the climate crisis.
Portrait by Jennifer Moller
