Lia Purpura is the author of 7 collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and three Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Herpoems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, Field and elsewhere. In 2015, her collection of poems It Shouldn’t Have been Beautiful, will be published by Viking/Penguin. She lives in Baltimore, MD and is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.