Bio & Contact

Contact Lia at liapurpura1@gmail.com.

Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays, All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books) has arrived!  Her most recent collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin.) She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three previous collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch & Taste of Ash).

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), she has been awarded a fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation  (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), and the Maryland State Arts Council, among others; she is also the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes.

Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Emergence, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays and The Pushcart Anthology.

Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop  in Tacoma, WA, and reads and lectures around the country. She lives in Baltimore, MD.