Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Lia Purpura

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Originally published on March 16, 2016.

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Lia Purpura is a poet, essayist, and translator from Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of four collections of poems–– King Baby (Alice James Books, 2008), Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State University Press, 2000), The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996), and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful(Penguin/Viking, 2015). Purpura has also written three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, and Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash).

Purpura is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Her essay collection On Looking was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Purpura reads and teaches extensively around the country, most recently in MFA programs at Columbia University, and Bennington, and at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and Chautauqua Writers’ Conference.

Purpura is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and she teaches in the low residency MFA Program, the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington.