Ann McCutchan is the author of five books: Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute, The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process, Circular Breathing: Meditations From a Musical Life, River Music: An Atchafalaya Story, and Where's the Moon?a Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream. As an essayist, arts journalist, and former syndicated columnist, she has published personal essays and articles in numerous journals, magazines and newspapers. "Reaching for the End of Time," an essay on the music of Olivier Messiaen and the frailties of heroes and the human body, appeared in The Best American Spiritual Writing. Her sixth book, The Life She Wished to Live:A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling, is set for an early 2021 release by W.W. Norton.
A librettist as well, Ann has collaborated on twelve works for the stage and concert hall. Recent projects include Swan's Inlet, an opera based on an original story, with composer Mark Alan Taggart, and Purewater, a chamber opera based on Andre Gide's novella La Symphonie Pastorale with composer Andrew Rudin. Among her eight previous musical works is an original contemporary stage play for Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat (Chamber Music Hawaii commission) which she wrote and directed. Of the premiere, American Record Guide noted: “After 85 years, A Soldier’s Tale has finally coalesced, music and drama interacting as equal partners to engage audience members, who left the theater discussing both animatedly.”
Ann McCutchan has been awarded grants, fellowships and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Cornell University, the Ucross Foundation, and others. She holds music performance degrees (clarinet) from Florida State University and the University of Michigan, and worked as an orchestral/chamber musician for twenty-five years, along the way earning an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. The founding director of the University of Wyoming's MFA creative writing program, she also taught creative writing at the University of North Texas, receiving the Kesterson Award for outstanding graduate teaching and serving as Editor of American Literary Review. Ann was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2010 and is a member of the artistic advisory board for Voices of Change, the Dallas contemporary music ensemble, and the board of the Museum of Friends, Walsenburg, CO. She lives in Wyoming.