One of America’s most influential writers, Anne Sexton has long been overshadowed by fellow confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell and is seldom featured in literary criticism. This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016), reassesses Sexton and her poetry for the first time in two decades and offers directions for future Sexton scholarship. With new access to her archives, the scholars and poets featured in this volume explore her work, responses to her contemporaries, and her legacy. In The Business of Words critical and creative perspectives intersect, inspiring new questions about Sexton’s poems and how to interpret them. This volume maps the influence of Sexton’s craft on twenty-first century cultural contexts and emphasizes her continuing vitality.

Please join us for lectures and discussion featuring contributors to This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton, moderated by the editor, Amanda Golden.