Elizabeth Willis was born in Bahrain and raised in the Midwest. She earned her B.A. from University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and her Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at University of Buffalo.
She is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), winner of the PEN New England/LL Winship Prize.
Reviewing Alive for The Rumpus, Patrick James Dunagan remarked, “Willis expertly handles the particular moment in time and space of the poem’s encounter, presenting sculpted instance(s) of momentary recognition full of significant impact, charging the language with multi-layered depth.”
She edited Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008). Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and a MacDowell residency. She has taught at Brown University, Mills College, the University of Denver, and Wesleyan University, and she currently teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
At MacDowell, she finished writing and editing her manuscript, Meteoric Flowers, and began work on a series of poems. She also wrote an essay about the modernist poet H.D.
