Lia Purpura, a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship recipient, is the author of:  

• Rough Likeness (essays, Sarabande Books, January, 2012)
       Buy This Book Now  

• King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008) 
       Winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award 
  

• On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006) 
       Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 
       Winner of the Towson University Award in Literature 
  

• Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000) 
       Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award
  

• Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State University Press, 2000) 
       Winner of the OSU Press/The Journal Award
  

• The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996) 
       Winner of the Towson University Award in Literature
  

• Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash
       (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998)

Additional awards include a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), four Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Colony, and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts.  

Purpura’s poems and essays appear, or are forthcoming in: Agni Magazine, DoubleTake, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies.  New essays are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2011 and Pushcart Anthology XXXV. 

A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop, in Tacoma, WA. Recently, she served as Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction,  Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama’s MFA Program, Visiting Writer at the Bennington Writing Program, and was Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory, in Rochester, NY. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.