Born in 1942, Ann Lauterbach was raised in New York City. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She moved to London before completing her MA in English Literature.
She lived in London for eight years, working variously in publishing and art institutions. On her return to the United States, she worked for a number of years in art galleries in New York before she began teaching.
Lauterbach is the author of several poetry collections, including Under the Sign (Penguin, 2013) and Or to Begin Again (Penguin, 2009), which was nominated for the National Book Award and which takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy inspired by both Lewis Carroll’s Alice and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. She is also the author of Hum (2005), If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000 (2001), On a Stair (1997), And for Example (1994), Clamor (1991), Bef