Lucy Sante on An Anthology of New York Poets

Born in Verviers, Belgium, Lucy Sante is a master excavator of lived experience and an urgent voice for our times. Her contributions to the world of American letters began with Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), a daring descent into the city’s seedy excesses from 1840 to 1920. Beyond its expert narration of New York City’s slums and streets, Low Life established Sante’s signature wit and curiosity, which has been a throughline over her ten works of nonfiction to her most recent I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (2024). Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2024 by the New York Times, this masterpiece of self-revelation chronicles the author’s gender transition in her late 60s. The reader accompanies Sante as she breaks the news to her then-wife and comes out to her students. After a lifetime of maintaining an effortful masculinity, the writer is tired of, as she puts it, “trying at all times to mount a production titled ‘Luc,’ written and directed and produced by and starring me.” Long an astute observer of discovery and rediscovery, whether the subject is a city or herself, Sante—having emerged from a tight circle of luminaries including Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin—is now on the precipice of a second artistic renaissance. As Dwight Garner put it in the New York Times, the life of Lucy Sante is a “story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring.” After teaching at Bard College for over two decades, Sante has retired from academia and lives in Kingston, New York.

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