Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura is a poet and essayist raised on Long Island. Purpura earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the poetry collections It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin, 2015), part of the Penguin Poets series; King Baby (Alice James Books, 2008), which won a Beatrice Hawley Award, now known as the Alice James Award; Stone Sky Lifting (The Ohio State University Press, 2000), and The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996). Purpura also translated the Grzegorz Musial collections Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash published in a joint volume in 1998 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, AGNI, Emergence, and other publications. 

Purpura’s essay collections include three with Sarabande Books, All the FierceTethers (2019), Rough Likeness (2011), and On Looking (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Increase (University of Georgia Press, 2000), winner of the 1999 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. 

Purpura’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, MacDowell, and the Maryland State Arts Council. 

Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Loyola University Maryland. She has also taught for the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as local workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and the Glenwood Life Counseling Center.