Laura Marris is a poet and translator. She is the recipient of a 2013 Daniel Varoujian award from the New England Poetry Club and recently received a Work in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She has also been a writer in residence at The University at Buffalo's Coalesce BioArt Lab. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, The Believer, The Point, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.
She has presented her work at Brown, Duke, Yale, and Boston University, where she served as director of Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, an organization dedicated to documenting poetry’s role in our lives.
Her recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, and To Live Is to Resist, a biography of Antonio Gramsci. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Press about her translations has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.
At MacDowell in 2015, Marris finished a draft of her translation of Louis Guilloux's novel Le Sang noir and her own first collection of poems, Night Palace. In 2022, she finished the first draft of her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness (Graywolf, 2024) and worked on the second draft during her 2023 Fellowship. In this collection of essays, she focuses on landscapes where personal and ecological loneliness entangle and inform each other.
