Anne Panning grew up in Arlington, Minnesota and attended Augsburg College.
She served in the Philippines and then returned to the United States to study for her MFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she graduated in 1993.
[1] Panning now teaches Creative Writing at State University of New York at Brockport and co-directs the Brockport Writers Forum with poet and colleague Ralph Black.
Panning recently returned from living in Vietnam for six months while her husband taught on a Fulbright Fellowship and is working on a memoir about the experience, tentatively called Viet*Mom.
Even when things aren’t going so well, her characters forge ahead, holding tight to their (mostly) modest goals: a nice house in a new subdivision, a reconciliation with an estranged wife, a new baby.