Office: 419 EPB Phone: 319-335-2053 e-mail: lia-purpura@uiowa.edu lpurpura@loyola.edu

Lia Purpura

Bedell Visiting Writer

Lia Purpura's new collection of essays, On Looking, published by Sarabande Press in August 2006, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. From that collection, "Glaciology" was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and was a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays, 2005; "Autopsy Report" was a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays, 2004. In 2004 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose.  

Increase, her first collection of essays, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000.  Her collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in 2000 as well. She is also the author of The Brighter the Veil (winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature/Poetry), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash , translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. Her poems and essays appear in many magazines, including Agni Review, DoubleTake, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Orion, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Ploughshares.

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 College in Baltimore, MD and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA Program in Tacoma, WA. During the Spring 2007 semester, she will be Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's MFA Program in Nonfiction