Lia Purpura writes with steely, unflinching precision about the things we often look away from—death, and specifically the body’s decay. In poems and essays, through irresistibly burnished language, she compels us to let our gaze linger, holding our attention until we can see a kind of beauty, order, and blessedness even in scenes of rot and loss. Her sense of language is lush and generous, and measured pacing is her trademark. Never stingy or sparse, she piles image on image in stately, loving meditations—on birds, animals, memory, human flesh—slowing us down enough to reveal the surprising beauty of her often disconcerting subject matter. Whatever she writes about, she makes regal.
Visit her website: www.liapurpura.com
Some of Purpura’s work is featured in Image issue 37 and issue 59. Read a poem by Purpura here.
Biography
Lia Purpura is the author of On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006), King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008), Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000), Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State University Press, 2000), The Brighter the Veil (Orchises Press, 1996), andPoems of Grzegorz Musial (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998).
Her awards, fellowships and citations include Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), the Beatrice Hawley Award (for King Baby), the Associated Writing Programs Award (for Increase), the Ohio State University Press Award (for Stone Sky Lifting), two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship for translation, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Her essays were cited as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays in 2004, 2005, 2007-9, and she has twice been the winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature.
Purpura’s poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Orion, Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Also, as a hypnotizing example of her short essay form, check out her love letter to the useful buzzard from Orion.
A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop, in Tacoma, WA. She served as Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction (spring semester, 2007), Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama’s MFA Program (February, 2008), Visiting Writer at the Bennington Writing Program (January 2009), and in April 2009, was Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory, in Rochester, NY. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.
Current Projects
June 2010
I’ll have a new collection of essays published in late 2011 by Sarabande Books. I don’t yet have a title for it, but I can say this: I’m interested in inhabiting multiple/complementary stances: that of metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness – all in service of illuminating what Virginia Woolf calls “moments of being” and Wordsworth called “spots of time” — those almost unnameable, nearly unworded but palpably felt states of being and knowing. I think these essays extend the subjects I explored in On Looking — art, the mysteries of the body, the inhabitants of the natural world, the beauty and nature of language. I’m really interested in using clear language to describe and inhabit elusive yet distinctly human sensations. I’m also working on a batch of new poems which these days seems to be getting shorter and shorter. Writing essays and poems at the same time is a mysterious endeavor — very much like using two different musculatures, or maybe cross-training.