Anne Pitkin grew up in Clarksville, TN, and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University. She earned a second master's from Antioch University in 1988. She has worked both as a community college instructor and as a psychotherapist. Winter Arguments (Ahadada Books, 2011) is her third collection after Yellow (Arrowood Books, 1989) and the chapbook Notes for Continuing the Performance (Jawbone Press, 1977). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many others. A mother of three, grandmother of two, she currently lives in Seattle, where she plays jazz piano with her friends.

Books by Anne Pitkin:

Other poems on the web by Anne Pitkin:
"Still Life"

Anne Pitkin's Home Page.

Anne Pitkin on Twitter.

About Winter Arguments:

"Anne Pitkin's poems have such lyrical sweep, such a sensitive eye for the natural world as it touches the human, that reading Winter Arguments is like seeing a landscape or, better, a richly realized painting of a landscape dotted with figures. But that would leave out their music, which would be a loss. This is a wise and graceful book by a well-traveled woman who knows how to confront deep feeling and frame it to make it all the more intense."
—Rosellen Brown

"In this strong follow-up to her earlier collection Yellow, Seattle poet Anne Pitkin effortlessly ranges from etudes based on art, music, and fairy tales to deceptively domestic narrative poems of mother and daughter, wife and husband. Winter Arguments showcases Pitkin's strength in parrying the two-edged sword of memory. A poem that at first reading may seem nostalgia mixed with regret reveals itself to be shot through with searing instants of hope and not a little subtle-wit. In their imagistic tableaux, these mature poems' lucent language a image reveal their turning facets the poet and our world. Pitkin, who possesses that crucial ability to first perceive and then beautifully convey the simple scene that evokes a revelation, excels at capturing the air of something waiting to happen, the energy inherent in a still life, and that which by its ordinariness implies the marvelous: a crow lopes from curbside to parking lot, / a chunk of ordinary bread in its beak."
—Sean Bentley

"When I try to imagine fife wihout poems ha matter, it's the presence of books like Anne Pitkin's Winter Arguments that make it impossible. Here is a poet mho knows the difference between sentimentality and sentiment, and who is unafraid of strong emotion. Recognizing herself as someone 'always looking for signs,' she is a ruthless observer of the luminous details and circumstances of the world, but never detail for detail's sake alone. Though her poems owe in much to musicians, painters, sculptors and writers, Pitkin does not so much borrow wisdom and insight as she exposes it. 'What recompense is art,' she wonders. This book answers that question."
—Samuel Green