About Writing
portfolio Visual
gallery Publications
& awards

Dear reader,

I fell in love with writing through my eyes, when my hand followed the elegant strokes of cursive letters that we imitated in the classrooms of Dan Emmett Elementary School in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Through those letter forms, I acquired the connection between script and idea; between eye and hand, thus launching me into both writing and visual art. Later, then as the wife of a Wellesley College professor, I learned to set cold type and to print on the letterpresses of Wellesley’s Book Arts Lab in the ultimate joining of word and fine art. During the years when I was primarily a fine artist, I showed work from Austin’s Laguna Gloria Art Museum and to London’s National Portrait Gallery. I talked about it too: I was a Visiting Artist at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I taught medical students how books convey authority and had them write and illustrate their own books for ideal curricula.

July 2026 Update

This happy writer will travel to humid central Tennessee for the 2026 Sewanee Writers Conference in mid-July. Is there anyone on the faculty who hasn't won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, an NAACP Award for Fiction, a Fulbright, a Guggenheim? My particular mentors will be Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Chris Bachelder, author of my book of the year, the fabulous The Throw Back Special. Lectures, readings, classes, consultations with authors and agents! I'll post a follow-up in good time, likely to be even happier than this!

The topic of my art was the interior of the human body, observed and portrayed in anatomy labs and morgues without medical training; seen as closely as possible like Renaissance medical explorers would have seen it when guided by their eyes alone. I wrote articles about my unique images and methods for medical humanities journals; I lectured about them at learned institutions (Northwestern University Medical School, Society for Literature and Science, Barnard College Feminist Art and Art History Conference, and Magdalene College Cambridge, among others).

Now, I am seeking representation for Spirits of Another Sort, my own literary novel with LGBTQ interest. I am currently working on another novel with the working title of Deportations.

~
 

Continue to my writing portfolio

Author Artist Advocate

Publications & awards

BLOG

Blog review of contemporary fine art and music, 2011-2016.
Finalist, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grants for 2012.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

These examples reflect my engagement with art in several capacities.

  • “Music in Words: Is Music Criticism a Form of Translation?”, Levure littéraire no. 14 (2018)
  • “Long Life!,” Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities, Vol 13, no. 21 (2018).
  • “What Won’t Kill You,” Eclectica, on-line magazine, October/November, 2011.
  • “Choosing My Own Doctor,” Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Ed. Howard Spiro. October 2001. Solicited article.
  • “leopardpeople/burning child,” introductory essay in Nils D. Dicaz, Leopardpeople: Eineinstallation in der Camp Gallery, Mt. San Angelo, Virginia, USA. Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2000.
  • New Music Box, articles, 2009-2011:
    • “Sounds Heard: “Spark of Being”—Music by Dave Douglas, Film by Bill Morrison,” April 2011.
    • “Sounds Heard: Eric Lund—‘by the line of the arc that they form,’” February 2011.
    • “Sounds Heard: Steve Butters—“Oomaharumooma,” October 2010.
    • “Moving Away from the Center of Jazz: Thomas Wirtel, a.k.a. Thomas Shabda Noor,” August 2010.
    • “Morgan Powell on the Creative Process: The Reality of Maborosi,” October 2009.
    • “Interview with Morgan Powell,” Perfect Sound Forever, July 2009.
    • Dancing with the Ramblers, The Tone Road Ramblers, Einstein Records, New York, 2008. Liner notes to music by Morgan Powell, John Fonville, and Eric Mandat.

GRANTS AND AWARDS

  • Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, residency, 2012
  • Finalist, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Grants for Arts Writers, Blog category, 2012.
  • Richard J. Margolis Award of the Blue Mountain Center, Finalist, 2008.
  • Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia. Artist residencies, 1996-2001, 2005, 2013.
  • The Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois. Artist residencies 1995-2007, 2018.
  • Reynolds Associates Fellowship, Historical Collections of the Lister Hill Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical School, 2001.
  • Purchase prize awarded by Jan Howard, Eleventh Annual National Drawing and Print Competitive Exhibition, College of Notre Dame of Maryland, 1999.
  • Resident Research Grant, Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1999.
  • Professional Development Grant, Massachusetts Cultural Council, 1998.
  • Purchase prize awarded by Janet Bishop, 1996 Stockton National Print and Drawing Exhibition.

TEACHING AND SERVICE

Teacher/Workshop Leader

  • School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Developed and taught “Artists and Mental Illness.” 2006.
  • Northwestern University Medical School. Classes on “Alternative Anatomy,” and “Inhabiting Authority,” through having students make their own medical books. 2004, 2003, 2001, 2000.
  • University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, Medical Education Department, special topics seminar, “Alternative Anatomy.” 2001.
  • Pennsylvania State College of Medicine. National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. 2002.
  • Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, Chicago. Clinical Pastoral Care Residency Program, workshop leader. 2001.

Visiting Artist

  • School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2006, 2005.
  • University of Chicago, 2000.
  • College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, 2000.
  • Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 2000.
  • Pennsylvania State University, 1997.

Writing portfolio

Books

Spirits of Another Sort
(Debut Novel Completed)

The Black List reports:

“In 1970, one of the first women admitted to a formerly all-male [Ohio] college navigates friendship, ambition, sexual politics, and self-discovery while forging an identity in a rapidly changing academic world.
 
The manuscript’s greatest strength is its immersive rendering of campus life during a period of significant social transition. The author captures the rhythms of freshman year with confidence, creating a novel that feels less concerned with plot mechanics than with the accumulation of formative experiences. Mamie’s journey through dormitories, classrooms, libraries, parties, and friendships evokes the intoxicating feeling of intellectual and personal awakening that defines the best campus novels. The prose possesses an elegant period sensibility without feeling pastiche or overly nostalgic. Equally impressive is the author’s handling of character relationships. Mamie’s friendship with Max is especially compelling, while her rivalry with Rooster provides both humor and tension. Questions of gender, class, ambition, sexuality, and belonging emerge organically through character rather than through overt commentary. Mamie’s status as an outsider—both as a woman and as someone from a less privileged background—creates a rich lens through which to explore institutional change. The result is a thoughtful bildungsroman that trusts readers to engage with its ideas through observation rather than exposition.”

Deportations
(Novel in Progress)

A faculty wife doesn’t realize that divorcing her husband will mean banishment by all her friends: teachers at the college who, like her husband, circle the wagons when institutional fealty is threatened. An investigation of private life in an insular community.

Essays

Criticism

Starr Review

STARR REVIEW is my independent blog of reviews and critical essays about contemporary visual arts, music, and, occasionally, literature. I have posted three or four times monthly from August 2011, focusing on events within a day’s drive of my home in Columbus, Ohio.

Starr Review was a finalist in the 2012 competition Arts Writers Grant competition sponsored by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.

My area of the country is rich in encyclopedic museum collections, including the civic museums of Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Indianapolis. Powerhouse venues dedicated to contemporary art—in terms of programming and architecture both include the Cincinnati and Cleveland MOCAs, and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. I review art wherever I travel, too: There are articles from DC and Dakar; from Portland, Oregon and Palm Springs, California.

I review exhibitions or performances of local, national, and international origin. The Review has an international readership, as well as strong local and national audiences.

By going directly to STARR REVIEW, you may browse through the archive month by month, or consult the labels, listed at the bottom of the screen, to get a sense of what I have written about. These are sample articles:

  • Four (Outstanding) Ways of Looking" at the Lindsay Gallery
  • Portland Japanese Garden and Lan Su Chinese Garden: Arts of Tranquility
  • The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936-1951
  • Jim Dine at the Cincinnati Art Museum: The Story of Pinocchio and Geppetto
  • Elijah Pierce, Sanctuary in the 1960s
  • Porcelain of the Possessed: Julie Elkins at Sherrie Gallerie
  • The Critic is not the gatekeeper or the triage manager. It’s my job to consider art and to be as available as possible to the thought and experience invested in it. I stretch to discover what has moved the artist, and to connect that with my own and with common experience.
     
    I want to encourage people to come to art works unburdened by received, ill-digested rules of engagement. I try to eliminate jargon and academic language, and to illustrate my discussions thoroughly with photos. My hope is to model approaches to art for readers who may believe themselves so ‘untrained’ and ‘unqualified’ that they are ‘ineligible’ to have deep or genuine personal experiences of art. The language of academic explanation, which can discourage museum and gallery visitors, sometimes supports such defeated attitudes.
     
    I do believe that art is personal, though: It’s in the world and as available to the viewer as anything else to be encountered in life. No one but the person who is there and looking owns the experience of art. It’s from that point of view that I write.
     
    For any artist who reads my review of his or her work, I try to describe what I see and how I react to it mentally and physically. When I offer my interpretation, I know that it may serve only to remind the artist that the work is on its own once it’s been released to the public. I realize that my thoughts may seem quite wrong-headed, even as I support them. Above all, I want to deliver a serious consideration, whatever the artist may make of it. It’s a gift of my time and scrutiny, due from any viewer to any artist, even when it can be in thought only.

 
 

Art Reviews

In the years prior to beginning STARR REVIEW, I wrote art reviews for The Other Paper, a Columbus weekly that has since ceased publication. I have also written freelance for the national webzine of the American Music Center, NewMusicBox:


 
 

Lectures

  • Excerpts from Artists and Mental Illness: Going to the Hospital, Going to the Artists’ Colony (PDF)
    ©Ann Starr
    The James Campbell Distinguished Lecture
    Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, Chicago
  • Cannibal Appetites. State University of New York at Cortland, 2004.
  • Reflections of a Mad Artist. D’Arcy Art Museum of the Loyola University of Chicago and Hektoen Institute for Medical Research, 2004.
  • Love in a Small Place: Straight Girl and Gay Boy in and out of the Closet. Kenyon College, 2002.
  • Medicine’s Clinical Representations of Abnormal Human Bodies. Illustrated with clinical photographs and with slides of Starr’s visual art. Society for Literature and Science, Buffalo 2001.
  • Doctors and Patients in Visual Relation. Yale University School of Medicine, 2001.
  • The Body Inside Me. Illustrated with Starr’s visual art. Barnard College Feminist Art and Art History Conference, New York 2001.
  • Medical Normality or Social Normality? Images of Human Infants and Fetuses with Visible Physical Abnormalities.” Magdalene College, Cambridge, 2001.
  • “I Tell You No Lies: Narration from Bipolar Illness.” Davis Lecture in Medical Ethics. University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine; 7th International Congress on the History of Medicine, Galveston, Texas; Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Post-Doctoral Program, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, 2000.
  • The Artist, Her Doctor, and Relational Portraits. Illustrated with historical images and slides of Starr’s visual art. National Portrait Gallery, London. Cosponsored by the British Society for the History of Science; organized by Ludmilla Jordanova, 2000.
  • The Body: Sensation, Fantasy, and Medical Knowledge, Northwestern University Medical School, 1999.
  • Book Artists’ Round Table, organized by the Center for Book Arts, New York, at Connecticut College, 1999.
  • Under My Skin: Curriculum Vitae, Story, and the Book,” Pennsylvania State University, 1997.

Visual gallery

Drawings


Amusing Self Portrait
2001•13.5 x 9.5 SOLD•

Bed and personal belongings
1996•12 x 8.5•

Blue Boy
2001•16.5 x 12•

Bowel
1997•7.5 x 11•

Classic signs
2000•19 x 13•

Day Room
1996•12 x 8.5•

Drawing
1990 (1)•19 x 26•

Drawing
1990 (2)•19 x 26•

Drawing (towers)
1989•19 x 26•

Enlarged eyeball
1997•9 x 8.5•

Extra Eyes
2006•

Floodgate
1998•10 x 8•

Gangrene
2000•19 x 13•SOLD•

Gout hand
2001•15 x 11•

House mother
2005•20 x 22•

Infant's hand with tumor (sketchbook)
Lake Waban (sketchbook)
1990•

Midnight gathering
1994•20 x 26•

My Providers
1996•12 x 8.5•

Reclining nude
1991•14 x 22•SOLD•

Rock this Woman
1994•10 x 8•

Roma
2010•

Safe
1996•

Self portrait as a house
1999•23 x 34.5•

Small world war
2000•21 x 28•

Smallpox arms
2001•

Sticky tongues
1997•8 x 12.5•SOLD•

Stop
1996•

Untitled (bombs)
1996•19 x 26•

Untitled infant
2000•19 x 13•

Valentine's Day
1991•12 x 9•

Paintings


Against forgetting
2007•23 x 35•

Anatomically Correct Woman
1998•56 x 43•

For Lizzie
2001•35 x 55•

Heating Plant
2001•66 x 31•

I see the moon
1993•50 x 47•

Multiple diagnoses
2005•22 x 28•

New Zealand first sight
2005•9 x 12•

New Zealand spring
2005•9 x 12•

Portrait of Self Being Received by Saints
1998•28 x 20•

Self portrait as a doctor
1999•35 x 25.5•

Self portrait with city
2001•45 x 35.5•

Spring for Persephadoradonna
1993•40 x 77•SOLD•

The Land of Far Out
2007•31 x 44•

Third Eye
2006•36 x 41•

Artist Books

from A TRIP TO DREAMLAND (10 x 7)

from ART AND LIFE

from BOREDOM 2005 (2 x 3)

from CONVERSATION (10 x 7)

from DOCUMENTARY 2006 (2 x 3)

from IN THE SPRINGTIME OF THE YEAR

from MILD WINTER 1998 (11.5 x 8.5)

from MODEL HOMES TOUR 1959 (1998)

from PARASOL 2001 (6 x 9)

from PARTY HAT 2006 (2 x 3)

from RED TAG SALE 1999 (2.5 x 4.75)

from REFLECTIONS ON PAST (10 x 7)

from SELF EXAMINATION 2006 (6 x 5.5)

from SOME PLACES YOU MIGHT BE

from SOME WORRIES 1998 (5.5 x 4.25)

from THE 47TH THANKSGIVING 1997

from THE DIAPHRAGM 1998 (6.5 x 10)

from THOUGHTS ON TERATOLOGY 1996 (9 x 6, ink on paper)

Contact

Columbus, Ohio, USA
(614) 235-0076

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“Destiny and Desire,” by Morgan Powell used by courtesy of the composer. It is performed by Ray Sasaki, trumpet, and Howie Smith, alto saxophone.
©2026 Ann Starr | Columbus, Ohio USA