Anne Finger
she/her
Anne Finger is an award-winning writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. Finger’s two memoirs, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin’s Press, 2006) and Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seal Press, 1990; British edition, Women’s Press, 1991; German translation, Fischer Verlag, 1992), place her personal experience of disability within a broader social context to look at how narratives of disease are formed and at the tensions and confluences between feminism and disability rights. Call Me Ahab (Bison Books, 2009), a collection of short stories that takes iconic disability stories such as Moby Dick and “crips” them, rewriting them from a disabled perspective, won the Prairie Schooner Award, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and was long-listed for the Cork City/Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
Other published works include novels Bone Truth (Coffee House Press, 1994) and A Woman, In Bed (Cinco Puntos, 2018), and short story collection Basic Skills (University of Missouri Press, 1988), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction. Finger is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and the Berlin Prize and has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Yaddo, Centrum, and Hedgebrook. She has taught both creative writing and disability studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, University of Texas at Austin, University of California, Berkeley, and as the Kate Welling Distinguished Scholar in Disability Studies at Miami University. Finger is currently working on a collection of personal essays, Wheeling in Berlin, as well as on a collection of essays on Gramsci and disability.