Lia Purpura’s latest collections are All the Fierce Tethers (essays, Sarabande Books) and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems, 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 five 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 Anthologies.
Lia Purpura has served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Loyola University, and has taught at The Rainier Writing Workshop, The Breadloaf Writers Conference, The Chautauqua Institution, The University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, The Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference and many other places. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.