Anya Krugovoy Silver (December 22, 1968 – August 6, 2018) was an American poet, scholar, and professor. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Georgia Author of the Year Award.
Biography
Anya Christine Krugovoy was born in Media, Pennsylvania, to George Krugovoy, a Ukrainian professor of Russian literature at Swarthmore College, and Christel Krugovoy, a German child-care provider. She grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and her first two languages were German and Russian. She began writing poetry in elementary school.
Silver earned a bachelor's degree in English and Creative Writing from Haverford College in 1990. After teaching high school English in Mississippi for a year, she enrolled at Emory University, where she completed a Ph.D. in English literature in 1997. At Emory, she met fellow graduate student Andrew Silver, whom she married in 1995. In 1998, she and her husband joined the English department faculty at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, where she taught for the next twenty years.
Cancer Diagnosis and Illness
In 2004, while pregnant with her only son, Noah, Silver was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form of the disease. She began chemotherapy while still pregnant, later describing the experience as an "incredible conflation of life and death." After chemotherapy, a mastectomy, and radiation therapy, her cancer went into remission for five years before returning as a bone metastasis in 2010. She lived with the disease until her death at age 49 in Macon, Georgia, on August 6, 2018.
Silver was a known advocate for metastatic breast cancer research. She rejected the "pink-washing" commonly associated with breast cancer awareness campaigns and repudiated the battle rhetoric often invoked by movement supporters.
Literary Career
Before committing to poetry, Silver published academic work on Victorian literature, including the book Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Her debut poetry collection, The Ninety-Third Name of God (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), addressed how life-threatening illness affects spirituality, sexuality, and relationships. Her second collection, I Watched You Disappear (2014), won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Poetry. Her third collection, From Nothing (2016), continued exploring illness and grief while embracing the experience of living in the present. Her fourth collection, Second Bloom (2017), was published by Cascade Books. At the time of her death, she was editing a fifth manuscript, Saint Agnostica, which her husband sought to publish posthumously.
Silver described herself as a confessional poet to the degree that her work drew from her life, while noting she was not as confessional as writers such as Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds. She stated that "any good writing about illness has to be confessional to avoid falling into cliché and sentimentality."
Awards and Honors
- 2015: Georgia Author of the Year Award for I Watched You Disappear
- 2018: Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry
- 2019: Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from Georgia Author of the Year
Selected Works
- Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (2002, academic monograph)
- The Ninety-Third Name of God (2010, poetry)
- I Watched You Disappear (2014, poetry)
- From Nothing (2016, poetry)
- Second Bloom (2017, poetry)
- Saint Agnostica (unpublished at time of death)
