Portrait of Lia Purpura

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.

AGNI has published the following work:

As the Crow Flies

Essay by Lia Purpura

Selected project notes (essay)

Art Feature by Lia Purpura

Threadings

Art Feature by Lia Purpura

Core Samples, or, Experiments with Days

Essay by Lia Purpura

Storycatcher

Essay by Lia Purpura

Owl: An Imaginary

Essay by Lia Purpura

Walk with Snowy Things

Essay by Lia Purpura

Two Experiments and a Coda

Essay by Lia Purpura

The Lustres

Essay by Lia Purpura

AGNI has published the following translations:

A Few Years After Nero

Poetry by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska Translated from the Polish by Lia Purpura and Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska

On Manet’s “Olympia”

Poetry by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska Translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska and Lia Purpura

Exorcist

Poetry by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska Translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska and Lia Purpura
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