Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura is the author of ten books of essays, poems, and translations, including the essay collections On Looking (Sarabande Books, 2006), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books, 2019), and the poetry collection It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin, 2015). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, AGNI, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Program, as well as five Pushcart Prizes and the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a contributing editor of AGNI. (updated 10/2025)
Purpura’s AGNI essay “Glaciology” won a Pushcart Prize and is reprinted in the 2006 anthology. She is the featured visual artist in AGNI 102.