Professor Emerita Nathalie Anderson works with students pursuing the Directed Creative Writing Project in Poetry.  During her 39 years teaching in the Department of English Literature, Professor Anderson taught courses in Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary Poetry and directed the Program in Creative Writing, serving as the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature. 

Professor Anderson is also an award-winning poet and accomplished librettist. Her first book, Following Fred Astaire, won the 1998 Washington Prize from The Word Works; her second, Crawlers, won the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; her third, Quiver, was published in 2011 by Penstroke Press: her fourth, Stain, was selected for the Hilary Tham Series at The Word Works by Eduardo Corral and published by them in 2017; and her fifth, Rough, was published by The Word Works in 2024.  Professor Anderson’s chapbook Held and Firmly Bound – a poetic exploration of a debt between the races in pre-Civil War Charleston SC -- was published by Muddy Ford Press in 2017; and she collaborated in 2021 with artist Susan Hagen and poet Lisa Sewell on Birds of North America. 

Professor Anderson's poems have been singled out for prizes and special recognition from the Joseph Campbell Society, The Cumberland Poetry Review, Inkwell Magazine, The Madison Review, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod, North American Review, and The Southern Anthology, and have also appeared in APR's Philly Edition, Atlanta Review, Denver Quarterly, DoubleTake, Journal of the Mythic Arts, Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Recorder, Southern Poetry Review, and Spazio Humano, among other literary magazines. Her work has been commissioned for the Ulster Museum's collection of visual art and poetry titled A Conversation Piece; for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Sarah McEneany at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania; and for the artist’s press book titled Ars Botanica published by Enid Mark of ELM Press. Her poetry also appears in The Book of Irish American Poetry From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame); in Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: An Anthology of American/Irish Poets, a collection she edited for Arlen House (distributed by Syracuse); and in Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (Wadsworth).  Her poems have twice been solicited for inclusion in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St.Martin’s).

Professor Anderson has authored libretti for five operas – The Black Swan; Sukey in the Dark; an operatic version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia; a children’s opera, The Royal Singer; and Cassandra – all in collaboration with the composer Thomas Whitman.  The first three of these operas were produced by Orchestra 2001; The Royal Singerand Cassandra were staged by Swarthmore students as part of a course in opera production.

A 1993 Pew Fellow, Nathalie Anderson has served also as Writer in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and as an officer (Arts Representative, President of the Southern Regional organization) of the American Conference for Irish Studies.