About Anne-Marie Brumm

Anne-Marie Brumm was born in New York City, grew up in Queens, and then moved to the West Village in Manhatan as an adult. She graduated with highest honors from Columbia University, then received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan.

Her introduction to books only came when she entered college. "I couldn't believe it", she says the first time she entered the campus bookstore. So many books, all these writers, "Who are they"? See her poem At The Campus Bookstore which won an Editor's Choice Award in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award in 2021.

Her immigrant home was totally devoid of books and her less than stellar high school only had a bare-bones library.

She would see so many books in the German bookstore where her mother was buying greeting cards to send to her family but she was not allowed to touch them. When she asked if she could have just one, her mother said firmly, "No, then you'll have your nose in a book all the time and not practice the piano." One of her pet peeves was having to play German folk songs on the piano when her mother's friends would visit. One of them would routinely stretch her fingers when she had difficulty reaching octaves.

Martin Scorsese once said his life began when he started his studies at NYU. Anne-Marie also would concur that her life began at Columbia.

She has taught full time in the English department of Kean University in New Jersey and part time at Rutgers University in Newark, and St Peter's in Jersey City.

While living in Israel, she taught at the Hebrew University Jerusalem and at Ben Gennon University in Beersheva. In Germany, she was a guest professor in The North American Studies Division at Albert Ludwigs University in Freiberg.

While a graduate student at the University of Michigan, she won two Avery Hopwood Awards for poetry. In 2019, she won The Carolyn Forche Award for humanitarian poetry. In 2020, and again in 2021, she received an editor's choice award in the Allen Ginsberg contest.