About

Anna Vitale is a poet, writer, and independent researcher. She/ they is/ are the daughter of working-class revolutionaries and the author of Detroit Detroit (Roof Books, 2017), a book of autobiographical essays, poetry, and transcriptions of recordings of dreams about race, belonging, difference, friendship, and childhood in Detroit in the 90s. As a teenager, her poem about gangs and police in her West side neighborhood was published by The Metro Times.

Anna earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan, an M.F.A. in Writing from Bard College, and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her doctoral research on suicidal fantasy and the life of the author began with interest in Amiri Baraka’s first book, which she found at a used bookstore in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her writing on David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series was published as the pamphlet Our Rimbaud Mask (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and an edited version is included in the Leslie Lohman Museum’s catalogue for their 2025 exhibit of the Rimbaud series.

Much of their early work was shaped by music, including the chapbooks Anna Vitale’s Pop Poems and Unknown Pleasures, a tribute to the Joy Divison album and an address on suicidality. Anna is also co-founder of the audio journal textsound. She began her career as a freeform radio DJ at WCBN-FM Ann Arbor and continued as host of The Tenderness Junction at WFMU and WGXC (on hiatus).

For over twenty years, a wide range of psychoanalytic thought has shaped Anna’s approach to writing and performance. Their readings are improvisatory and their research overtly intimate. Anna’s essay on hatred, race, and childhood development, “The Texture of Being and Becoming White,” was published in 2023 in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Anna is currently working on several books: a book about breakdown; a book about her mother, and a book about becoming a mother and listening to Stevie Wonder entitled Talking Book. She’s also part of the editorial collective behind Continuous Present, a new journal of contemporary music, poetry, and intermedia practices.

Anna lives in Tivoli, NY with her partner and their daughter.