A Life in Verse: Ann Fisher-Wirth Appointed State Poet Laureate

Gov. Tate Reeves appointed her as the official state poet for a four-year term.

"I am confident that Ann will represent our state with grace and dedication, fostering a deep appreciation for poetry and literature throughout Mississippi," Reeves said.

She has always been enamored with poetry; as a teenager, her favorite poets were T.S. Eliot, e. e. cummings and Robinson Jeffers. That love was fostered following the death of her father.

"Poetry and literature in general became a great source of companionship for me," Fisher-Wirth said. "Great literature – poetry as well as fiction – has to be truthful about things like suffering and death as well as happy things. And I don't think that our culture is generally very truthful about those things."

Originally wanting to be Miss America when she grew up, Fisher-Wirth came from a long line of English teachers. And she followed in their footsteps.

After graduating from Pomona College in 1968, she taught English at the International School of Liège, Belgium, for three years. She also taught at Pomona College and Scripps College in California and at the University of Virginia.

In 1988, she and her husband, Peter Wirth, moved to Oxford, where she taught at the University of Mississippi for 34 years. Until retiring in 2022, she directed the undergraduate minor in environmental studies and taught workshops and graduate seminars for the master's program in creative writing.

Fisher-Wirth is a senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, a group of poets and scholars whose work focuses on environmental and social justice and matters of the spirit.

She is the 2023 Governor's Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry recipient and has received various awards, including three Mississippi Arts Commission poetry fellowships and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award.

However, it wasn't until sitting in on Aleda Shirley's poetry workshop around 1990 at Ole Miss that Fisher-Wirth knew that she wanted to be a poet.

"I had always kind of wanted to write poetry, and I wrote some poems when I was supposed to be writing my dissertation because you'll do anything to keep from writing that," she said.

"I said to her (Shirley), 'One day, can I sit in on your class?' I did that, and I left class that day saying, 'OK, this is what I'm doing from now on.'"

Fisher-Wirth stopped working on a scholarly monograph about Willa Cather and began seriously writing poetry. Her first book of poetry, "Blue Window" (Archer Books), was published in 2003.

"And since then, it's been what I've done."

She has published eight books of poetry, four chapbooks, and – with coeditor Laura-Gray Street – two anthologies of ecopoetry, most recently "Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology" (Trinity University Press, 2025). She also collaborated with Mississippi photographer Maude Schuyler Clay on "Mississippi" (Wings Press, 2018), a book that showed her love for the state.

"The poems in 'Mississippi' enlarge, and challenge and deepen the photos," said Beth Ann Fennelly, Mississippi poet laureate from 2016 to 2021. "Our state's people are her muses, and she's not interested in repeated tired, negative perceptions of Mississippi. Her love for the people and land comes through in everything she writes."

Fisher-Wirth said she has been influenced by "tons of people over the years."

"The first poet that I really loved was T.S. Eliot," she said. "In high school, I especially loved his 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' one of the greatest poems about self-consciousness ever written. But then I discovered the poetry of William Carlos Williams in graduate school, and that opened my awareness of whole new possibilities for writing."

From Williams, she realized that the process of creativity can be a way of living – "The dream is in pursuit," Williams writes – and that poetry is very much part of life.

"It's just noticing what lies around you and working with language to create beauty, feeling and memorability and to honor the powers of our life and death and everything in between."

As poet laureate, Fisher-Wirth will share her enthusiasm and love for poetry throughout the state.

She plans to continue supporting the Mississippi Poetry Project for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, started by previous poet laureate Catherine Pierce. She also hopes to begin a podcast for classroom use called The Beloved Poem Project, where fellow poets and teachers will discuss their favorite poems.

Additionally, she wants to develop a community-based poetry project.

"This would be place-based and would invite people to come together and write about things in their community," she said. "It would then take fragments of what different people wrote and become the poem of Coffeeville, or Iuka, or Ocean Springs or wherever the community may be located."

Fisher-Wirth's new role complements her work as an author and environmental educator, said Caroline Wigginton, chair of the Department of English.

"Her enduring participation in environmental and poetry communities brings Mississippi to others, and during her career she earned also a well-deserved national and international reputation," Wigginton said. "All who will read or hear her verse will say, 'This is a woman who loves Mississippi, and who revels in its power and beauty, but who is also not afraid to write also about how we can do better, in part through the sharing of poetry.'"

Fisher-Wirth wants people to look at the other-than-human world around them and learn to value it and therefore take better care of it.

"Poetry can't make people do things, but it can give them pleasure, give them comfort, increase their awareness of beauty, awaken the heart, awaken the imagination," she said. "It can make us live more abundantly."

Top: Ann Fisher-Wirth, who has taught English, creative writing and environmental studies courses for more than four decades, is Mississippi's new poet laureate. She retired from the university in 2022 after 34 years on the faculty of the Department of English. Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services