Anna Joy Springer (she, they) is a lifelong Californian whose artistic work uses fantastical, speculative, and other figurative modes to explore the nature of interbeing and to register lesser cultural currents through writing and pictures.
She is author of the books, The Birdwisher and The Vicious Red Relic, Love, and The Forests of the Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Companion tothe Memoir, along with over fifty other publications across genres.
Frontwoman of former punk bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy’s hardcore full-throated feminism inflects a wildly responsive performance style that’s saturated in femme camp, intellectual reflexivity, and political outrage on each of her twelve records. Springer widely toured the U.S. and Europe in the 1990’s with these bands and as a member of Sister Spit, a queer feminist group of punk writers.
Currently an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, Anna Joy helped design and direct its cross-genre MFA program in literary arts and has received a Distinguished Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction, as well as a Chancellor’ Associates Award for her unique contributions to Performance and Visual Arts.
She performs widely and teaches a wide range of writing, graphic texts, and embodied mindfulness courses incorporating over twenty years of experience as a writing instructor and as a student of both Zen and Theravadan Buddhist practices.
As actual birds and bird symbology remain favorite subjects, Anna Joy is happy to live with her beloved and pets in the Hollywood hills, surrounded by Screech Owls.
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