Ann E. Wallace, PhD is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey. She is a poet, essayist, and public speaker who has written and spoken widely about her experience with Long COVID. As a long-time survivor of ovarian cancer, a woman with multiple sclerosis, and one of the nation's first Long Covid patients, she has lived and written through illness for more than thirty years. Pain, disability, and disease—as well as hope and resilience—have inspired and informed her work as a poet, memoirist, patient advocate, and scholar. 

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Wallace is author of three poetry collections: Keeping Room (Nixes Mate, 2026), Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024), and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). Her work is anthologized in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press), The Big Brutal Act (Harbor Editions), The Long COVID Reader (Long Hauler Publishing), and other collections, and her essays have appeared in Huffington Post, USA Today, and other media outlets. 

 

Wallace is co-host and co-producer of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey, featuring highly-acclaimed guests engaged in vital work for our earth, whether as poets, ecologists, botanists, native plant leaders, or in another capacity. 

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​In her academic scholarship, Wallace specializes in illness narratives, the rhetoric of health and medicine, traumatic memory and community formation, as well as composition theory -- including the overlaps between teaching college writing and inviting students to bear witness to the world around them. Her essay "On Learning to Live and Write Through Long COVID: The Lessons of Little Women" is featured in WSQ's September 2026 tthemed issue on Chronic. She was invited to write the lead essay, “Long-Haul Writing: Creating Community Amid Crises” on teaching while sick in the early months of the pandemic in a new collection, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies (Peter Lang 2022). Her essay "Quarantined Voices: On the Transformative Impact of COVID Narratives at a Time of Crisis" was published in On_Culture (summer 2021). Her work has also appeared in Women’s Health Advocacy: Rhetorical Ingenuity for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2019); Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy; Come Weep with Me: Loss and Mourning in the Writings of Caribbean Women Writers (Cambridge, 2007; The Fiction Of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity (NCTE, 2007).

 

Wallace serves on the NIH RECOVER Initiative on Long COVID as co-chair of the National Engagement Committee's Communications Subcommittee. She has been invited to speak about her illness at webinars and conferences and for national media, including Good Morning, America, PBS, NBC, CBS, NPR, Fox News Radio and more. 

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Wallace grew up in a large family in a waterfront town in Massachusetts, and migrated years ago to New Jersey to study art in college and never left. She completed a Masters in Women's Studies at Rutgers University and her doctorate in English at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Wallace is Professor of English at New Jersey City University. 

 

Wallace’s published work, media appearances, and selected author talks can also be found here and on linktr.ee/annwallacephd. She is a SheSource Expert with the Women’s Media Center and can also be found on Poets & Writers. Follow her online on Instagram @AnnWallace409.