Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations, most recently the poetry cycle It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin). Her second book of essays, On Looking, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other recognitions include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, the AWP Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry. Her work has appeared in Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, and is a contributing editor of AGNI. (updated 4/2017)

Purpura’s AGNI essay “Glaciology” won a Pushcart Prize and is reprinted in the 2006 anthology.