Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Laure-Anne Bosselaar was born in 1943. She grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has published poems in French and Flemish and translates American poetry into French and Dutch poetry into English. She is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019); A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007); Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997).

As an anthologist, Bosselaar edited Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2004); Outsiders, Poems About Rebels, Exiles and Renegades (Milkweed Editions, 1999), and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City (Milkweed Editions, 2000). She coedited, with Kurt Brown, Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars (Milkweed Editions, 1997).

About her work, the poet Charles Simic has said, 

Laure-Anne Bosselaar understands the complexities and the endless contradictions of our contemporary human predicament. Hers is an authentic poetic voice, one serious enough to be heard at the end of this long and brutal century. She writes wise poems about memory, poems whose art lies in their ability to make these memories ours too. What more could any one of us ask of poetry?

Bosselaar is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Hamilton College, and the Vermont Studio Center. She was the McEver Chair for Visiting Writers at Georgia Tech University, and taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College and University of California, Santa Barbara. She served as the Santa Barbara Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021 and teaches in the Solstice Low Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College.