Lia Purpura, a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship recipient, is the author of:  

• Rough Likeness (essays, Sarabande Books, January, 2012)
       Buy This Book Now  

• King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008) 
       Winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award 
  

• On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006) 
       Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award 
       Winner of the Towson University Award in Literature 
  

• Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000) 
       Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award
  

• Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State University Press, 2000) 
       Winner of the OSU Press/The Journal Award
  

• The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996) 
       Winner of the Towson University Award in Literature
  

• Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash
       (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998)

In addition to a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, Lia Purpura has also been awarded an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony.

Purpura’s poems and essays appear, or are forthcoming in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays 2011 and  The Pushcart Anthology #30, 34 & 35.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is a Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA.  Recently, she served as Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction,  Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama’s MFA Program, and Visiting Writer at the Bennington Writing Program, as well as Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory, in Rochester, NY.  She will be teaching at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in August, 2013.  She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.