Lia Purpura was awarded a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. Her collection of essays, Increase, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000. Her collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in 2000 as well. She is also the author of The Brighter the Veil (winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has published poems and essays in many magazines, including Agni Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Ploughshares. Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA Program in Tacoma, WA. Her essay “Autopsy Report” was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays: 2004, and “Glaciology” was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize.