Anna Catone

ACADEMIC INSTRUCTOR

Anna earned her AB in English and creative writing at Princeton University where she won both the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize and the Francis Lemoyne Page Thesis Prize. After graduating magna cum laude, she went on to earn both an MA in English at Middlebury College (where she was the Reginald and Juanita Cook Scholar) and an MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She worked in numerous editing and publishing roles in addition to jobs at arts organizations including Harvard University, David R. Godine, Publisher, the PEN American Center, the Poetry Society of America, and The New Yorker before discovering her love for teaching. She has taught nearly all age groups both creative writing and English, with her most recent position being at Boston College. She is a published writer and has been poetry editor at The Cortland Review for almost fifteen years.

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One of my more rewarding classroom experiences was teaching a number of students in their first year seminar and then serving as their thesis director a few years later when they were pursuing MFAs in creative writing. It was remarkable to see their growth.

What astonished me was the way in which they each came to deepen a set of concerns they had at the beginning of their college experiences, to turn it over in their minds, to rework that set of ideas or problems, intellectual pursuits, questions, and even for some, passions. They deepened their understanding. They found other ways of looking and rethinking: they found possibilities in these tangled up ideas, ways of coming to know themselves better that could only be their work, their efforts, authentic to each of them.

I love engaging in this same process with high school students seeking to identify their own story and develop a voice, uniquely their own, in their college admissions process. This aspect of writing — the development of voice — seems to me the most compelling piece of teaching writing.

When you complete your application for college, you are identifying who you are to a stranger. It is a ridiculous task. You are trying to create a voice on a page that resonates when someone begins reading. If you fake it or you try to present yourself as someone other than who you are, your reader will know. This is the task: to be yourself. To find the voice to tell your story. I love helping people do that. I hope I can help you.