A Word About Ann
Ann McCutchan is the author of Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Amadeus Press, 1994) and The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process (Oxford University Press, 1999). As an essayist, she has published work in Boulevard, Image, Cimarron Review, and other literary journals. 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 2007 (Houghton Mifflin).
Current projects include Water Music, a memoir of experiences along the coasts of Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, blending a personal narrative of musical life with a meditation on the musical qualities of birdsong, weather, and other natural phenomena.
Ann began her writing career as classical music critic for the Austin American-Statesman and art and antiques columnist for Gannett News Service. As a journalist, she wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on the fine and literary arts, family issues, travel, and the environment, and received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America.
A musician and librettist as well, Ann has collaborated on works for the stage and concert hall. Recent projects include Scaling the Walls, an evening-length multi-media work created with artist Pat Alexander (Maryland Institute College of Art) and choreographer Joyce Morgenroth (Cornell University) and premiered at Cornell (2002) with a revised version in Baltimore (2004). In 2003, her script for Igor Stravinsky’s WWI musical play A Soldier’s Tale, commissioned and premiered by Chamber Music Hawaii, drew high critical praise, and Possible Paths for narrator and percussion with composer/percussionist John Lane (2005) has enjoyed multiple performances.
Ann McCutchan has received grants, fellowships and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the National Park Service, Lancaster Theological Seminary, Cornell University, the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Arts Council, and the University of North Texas. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, a BM in Music Performance from Florida State University and a MM in Music Performance from the University of Michigan. She has taught at Cornell University, the University of Texas, Stephen F. Austin State University, and Loyola University, and was founding director of the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming. In 2007, she taught in Image’s Glen Workshop at St. John’s College in Santa Fe; she will return in 2008.
Ann currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where she is prose editor of American Literary Review.
