Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura's first collection of poems, The Brighter the Veil, was published in 1996 by Orchises Press. Her collection of lyrical essays, Increase, won the 1999 Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September 2000. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow, she has published poems, essays, translations and reviews in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Antioch review, Iowa Review, New Letters, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares and Verse.

In 1992 she was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland to translate the work of four contemporary poets. A collection of her translations, Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, has recently been released from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Purpura is the recipient of a Millay Colony Fellowship, residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center as well as the Visions International Prize in Translation, the Randall Jarrell Prize, and, for The Brighter the Veil, the Towson University Prize in Literature. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Lia Purpura teaches in the Writing/Media Department at Loyola College.