The Fair Fields: My Way to Words

by Rosanna Warren

A memoir-in-vignettes recalling a poet's early years and memories from a literary household.

More than a consecutive memoir, The Fair Fields presents a set of linked vignettes about what it was like to grow up in a white, liberal, literary household in Connecticut in the 1950s and early 1960s. Listeners will meet characters they probably recognize, including Rosanna Warren's parents―writers Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark―and their authors, visual artists, musicians, editors, and publishers.

The narrative tracks Rosanna's early childhood to young womanhood, taking in along the way visions of neolithic Brittany, Roman ruins in southern France, the French Revolution, the Algerian War, and the throes of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. As much as a personal story, it's a set of portraits from a certain gallery of post–World War II American intellectual life. It also tells the tale of a young artist finding her way from painting, her first vocation, to a life in writing.

176 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication December 8, 2026

About the author

On July 27, 1953, Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut. She studied painting at Yale University, where she graduated in 1976, and an MA in 1980 from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

She is the author of Ghost in a Red Hat (W.W. Norton, 2011); Departure (2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981).

She has also published a translation of Euripides’s Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995), a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2008), and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989).

Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the Nation/“Discovery” Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.

She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. She was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. She is a professor at The Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago, IL.