K. Anne Amienne

Founder and Director

Anne is a big ideas person who likes to help others think more deeply, write more intelligently, and engage more widely. With a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she can empathize with hard workers and high achievers who write in high-pressure environments. At the 2026 Aspen Ideas Festival, she will lead a workshop for serious thinkers on writing the book that brings their expertise to wider audiences.

For over twenty years, she taught and mentored writers of many ages in the US and Europe, including at Chicago and Duke. Under the pen name Anne Bramley, she created one of the earliest podcasts, winning the first Podcast of the Year award at the Portable Media Expo in 2005. That work led to an agent and a trade book. At Duke she went through press training, became a faculty expert for the Communications Office, and experienced first-hand how universities work with media outlets to help academics make an impact. She has written for NPR, Saveur, and the Washington Post and has appeared on BBC and NPR Radio, PBS-UNCTV, Australia's ABC, and Martha Stewart Living Radio to talk about everything from food history to new media.

Anne has lived and worked in Germany, the US, and the UK and currently divides her time between UK's East Anglia and the US East Coast. As someone raised outside the middle-class academic mainstream, she has extra insights for others who navigate how to "belong" in exclusive spaces. She especially enjoys working with women grappling with the complexities of being "gifted" and helping book writers and public scholars see that so much more is possible than they thought.

Services:

Transform, Advance, Public Scholars Group, Engage, university workshops, retreats, and one-to-one office hours