Anne Boyer

The Undying won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and it began with a diagnosis of aggressive triple-negative breast cancer a week after its author turned forty-one. Anne Boyer was then a single mother teaching in Kansas City, and she wrote against the grain of the recovery memoir, setting her own treatment beside older writing on illness, the economics of American medicine, and the question of who gets paid to care for whom. Born in Topeka in 1973 and raised in Salina, she took a degree at Kansas State University and an MFA in poetry at Wichita State. She was a poet well before the memoir: Garments Against Women appeared in 2015, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate in 2018. She taught at the Kansas City Art Institute from 2007 to 2023 before moving to the University of St Andrews, and in November 2023 resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine over the paper's coverage of the war in Gaza.