ArborAnn

About the Artist

Ann Arbor,a poet and novelist, has been a member of the Maine Touring Artist Program presenting writing workshops and doing poetry performances in the Maine schools since 1993. She believes deeply in the need for creative writing in the Public Schools and loves teaching writing, particularly with teenagers. As a co-director of the Literary Arts portion of the Regional Arts Talent Program for Students in area high schools in Maine from 1991-1996, Ann encouraged young writers to find their voices and to use them. Students in these classes not only wrote, but published their poems and stories in book form and presented public readings of their work.

During that time Ann completed her first novel, About Time, in 1997, a coming of age story about a young woman working on a ship and then in a papermill in Western Maine. She is currently looking for an agent for this book.

Ann has been an active as a Board Member of The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Inc. since 1989 and a member of the Editorial Board of the Beloit Poetry Journal since 1976. She also served as a judge for the Travis tuck Jordan Poetry Contest for the North Carolina Poetry Society in 1994.

Ann has traveled widely to teach and to participate in panels, lectures, and stagings on poetry and the creative arts for over two decades. She taught for English for years in a Middle School in Wisconsin, and in various universities in China including Fudan University in Shanghai, Nankai University in Tianjin, and Zheda University in Hangzhou.

As part of the Beloit/Fudan Translation Workshop, she helped organize and worked with collaborative group translating of young contemporary Chinese poets in 1987 resulting in the publication of Smoking People: Encountering the New Chinese Poetry (Beloit Poetry Journal Chapbook #19, Winter 1988/89). She performed in stagings of Gu Cheng's, The City" at Harvard, Indiana, South Bend and Beloit College from 1994-2000. She presented "Six Little Poems," as a series of Fulbright Lectures in China with poet and husband, John Rosenwald, 1996-97 and 2001-2002.

Ann has also worked as a poet-intern with the Worcester County Poetry Association in Massachusetts, recieved a grant as a Poet-in-Residence for the Maine State Arts Commission, and published poems in numerous places including, The Worcester Review, The Wisconsin Poets' Calandar, and the California Quarterly, and The Blue Sofa Review.

Ann has taught creative writing workshops for people from kindergarten through senior citizens still interested in the use of language and their imaginations. She is also a fine arts photographer and developes her own prints in both Black and White and Color. She has published many of her photographs and had several one woman shows. In the future she hopes to combine her writing and her photography into a book about teaching and travelling in China and Tibet.