Born in Detroit, Michigan, Catherine Anderson’s work has appeared in The American Voice, The Antioch Review, Harvard Review, The Women's Review of Books, and others, as well as the anthology Working Classics: Poems of Industrial Life. She was the Cornelia Ward Fellow for Poetry at Syracuse University in 1976, where she received an M.A. in English and creative writing in 1979. She lives in the Boston area, where she teaches and works in Boston's immigrant communities.

“In poems as variously fine as ‘A Body of Heart’ and ‘This Woman,’ Catherine Anderson is her own woman, a wonderfully original poet. Amid what sees as ‘the blunt confusion’ of every kind of life, her poems courageously validate what they claim: ‘Even out here I am human.'”
—Philip Booth

“Anderson’s best poems do more than sketch characters (immigrants, farmworkers…); they tell the stories of those whose mother tongue is drowning out in American society, particularly in our times, and they suggest how these stories and characters represent more than themselves, i.e., a political situation quite different from the middle class standard.”
—Peter Oresick, The Minnesota Review