Ann Bookman

Ann Bookman is a poet, anthropologist and social justice advocate.  She has been studying poetry for twenty years with Boston area poets and in residential workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.   Her poems have been published in Chronogram, Larcom Review and Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, among others. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Point of Attachment, with Finishing Line Press. Her first full collection, Blood Lines, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

Bookman has held a number of research and teaching positions in the academy, including Brandeis University, MIT and the College of the Holy Cross. A nationally known scholar and policy expert in women’s issues, work/family balance and community engagement, she has published widely in scholarly journals and is the co-author with Sandra Morgen of Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Temple University Press) and the author of Starting in Our Own Backyards: How working families can build community and survive the new economy (Routledge).

Bookman has also worked in government. She was a Presidential Appointee during the Clinton administration, serving as Policy and Research Director of the Women’s Bureau at the US Department of Labor and as Executive Director of the bipartisan Commission on Family and Medical Leave. 

Her career has been bookended by positions focused on women’s creativity, potential and power.  Early in her career she served as Associate Director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College working with an interdisciplinary group of women scholars, writers and artists. From 2013 through 2018, she was Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston weaving an intersectional feminist perspective into her teaching, research and activism. 

She is currently a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston.