Discipline: Literature – nonfiction, Literature – poetry

Lia Purpura

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction, Literature – poetry
Region: Baltimore, MD
MacDowell Fellowships: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2013
Lia Purpura is the author of many collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her sixth book, It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful, features her essays. She has received recognitions including a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart prizes, work in Best American Essays, 2011, the AWP Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley, and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry. Her work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop. She worked on a new collection of essays, lyric in sensibility, yet openly concerned with dire human/environmental predicaments.

Studios

Phi Beta

Lia Purpura worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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