Doug Anderson

Who is Doug Anderson?

Doug Anderson is an American poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. His most recent book is a memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery. His honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, and the MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Connecticut Review, The Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Field, and The Autumn House Anthology of American Poetry, as well as this year’s Contemporary American War Poetry. He also published a play, Short Timers, which was produced in New York in 1981.

He served in Vietnam as a corpsman with a Marine infantry battalion in 1967. He graduated from the University of Arizona. He worked in the theater, as an actor. He then settled in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he began to write plays and poems in a workshop with Jack Gilbert, and Linda Gregg.