ABOUT ANNE
Anne McPherson Arthurs was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up there, the daughter of a university professor and an academic advisor. From a young age she was drawn to stories and spent hours at her local library and Waldenbooks in the mall. She used cardboard and markers to create her own book covers but rarely finished a story to fit inside until junior high. During the summer months of her childhood, she spent hours playing outdoors in the woods surrounding her house, often alone, where she developed a deep and abiding love of the Southern Illinois landscape that would land on the pages of her future novels.
During her adolescent years, Anne continued writing stories she would be too embarrassed to show you now. She also read avidly. But it wasn’t until high school that she was exposed to the great contemporary fiction that drove her desire to become a serious writer, starting when Barbara Kingsolver visited her freshman English class to talk about her craft.
Anne attended Southern Illinois University where she studied under Kent Haruf and Beth Lordan and earned her BA in English. She earned her MFA at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo where she studied under Stuart Dybek and Jamie Gordan. As an undergrad, she was a big fish in a small pond, but in graduate school, she realized there were a lot fish who wrote better, and after graduation, she stopped writing for nearly two decades. In the meantime, she read. Obsessively.
Anne moved to the Chicago suburbs with her husband, raised two children, and worked as an Executive Assistant for many years. In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, she rediscovered her love of writing when a story popped into her head that she had to write it down. She has been writing ever since.
Anne’s fiction has appeared in The Whitefish Review, Ariel Chart, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Embark Journal, October Hill Magazine, The Westchester Review, Peruse Lit, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Milk House, and Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts. Her short story, “Piano Lesson,” was nominated for the 2024 Best of the Net Award. Anne is a member of the Women Fiction Writers Association and the Chicago Writers Association. She continues to read and write daily, usually with a dog at her feet.
