Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations, most recently Rough Likeness. Her essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they're also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.Lia Purpura is Writer in Residence at Loyola University, Baltimore, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program. Her awards include a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), NEA and Fulbright fellowships, four Pushcart prizes, the AWP Award in nonfiction and the Beatrice Hawley award in poetry. Recorded On: Tuesday, May 22, 2012