Anne Conover Carson

Anne Conover Carson passed April 23, 2018 from a stroke at her home in Washington DC. Her death was quite unexpected and sudden, catching family and friends totally by surprise. She had just returned to Washington from her annual Winter sojourn in La Jolla and Palo Alto, California. Anne was happy, engaged, and healthy until the end, passing within 36 hours of entering Sibley hospital, with her daughter Natalie by her side.

Anne was raised in Kansas City, Missouri where her family on both sides were pioneering and prominent bankers, lawyers, and business owners of Dutch and Irish ancestry. She was a 1949 graduate of Stanford University, with a BA in English Literature, studying with Wallace Stegner. Later -- after having lived with her first husband geologist Thomas Ambrose in Cuba during Castro's Revolution, then Puerto Rico and Colombia -- she returned to Stanford in 1966 to get a Masters Degree in Latin American Studies.

Anne's first job was as an editor for the Ladies Home Journal and Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia. Then during her years in Cuba and traveling throughout Latin America in the 1960s, she worked as a freelance Journalist for newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Kansas City Star, and The Times of the Americas. After her divorce, she and her daughter Natalie left Bogota, Colombia and made their permanent home in Washington DC, where Anne worked as a writer, editor, and researcher for the Johns Hopkins Press, the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Information Agency. She also had her own editorial firm for many years -- Anne Carson Associates.

After retirement, Anne continued her studies in the craft of writing through workshops and retreats at Middlebury College's Breadloaf and Bennington College in Vermont, and with Esquire's and Alfred Knopf's controversial editor Gordon Lish at Columbia University in New York City. She wrote four books after she was 60 -- Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda (1990 ; reissued as an ebook in 2018); Risks and Rewards: A Memoir (with Julia Montgomery Walsh in 1998); Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: What Thou Lovest Well (Nominee for Best Scholarly Biography of Year 2001); and Cuban Sketchbook: A Memoir (2016). She was an active writer, lecturer, and conference presenter, contributing to academic journals such as Paideuma and at EPIC, the bi-annual Ezra Pound International Conference.

In Washington, Anne re-married in 1970. A graduate of St. Alban's School and Princeton, Thomas Bode Carson worked for many years as a senior loan officer at the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as a writer and lecturer on the future. Tom died of cancer in 2002. Later in life, Anne accompanied another widower and long-time friend -- James Hulbert. Jim was a Washington native, a Harvard University graduate, a published author of several bestselling novels, and a founding executive of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Like many creative, engaged, and concerned people, Anne had many interests, passions, affiliations, and causes. Interests ranged from Chinese Brush Painting to Spanish Classical Guitar. Club memberships included Chevy Chase, Metropolitan and Gibson Island Club in Washington, and the Knickerbocker Club in New York. Affiliations spanned everything from the Humane Society to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the American Friends of Blérancourt to the Van Kouwenhoven-Conover Family Association. She was forever positive and enthusiastic in spite of life's challenges and disappointments . . . this was perhaps her greatest trait. Among her many favorite sayings to live by -- "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."

She is survived by her daughter -- Natalie Ambrose of Washington and Puerto Rico -- as well as a large "Conover" clan in the Bay Area of California and "Pinkerton" relatives in Kansas and New Jersey. And because of her kind and generous spirit -- and her writing -- she will live on in many friends, colleagues, and admirers far and wide.