National Poetry Month is on its way and the poets of the English Department here at UMBC will be out to celebrate in a big way. On Tuesday, April 5, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, Lia Purpura and Tanya Olson will be sharing their work at the Central Library branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The event will be located in the Meyerhoff Children's Garden, Night Room at 400 Cathedral Street in Baltimore, MD 21201. Please considering joining them as they help share the wonderful world of the word with our local communities.
Lia Purpura’s new collection of poems, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin/Viking), was published in October 2015. She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby,Stone Sky Lifting, and The Brighter the Veil); three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, and Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash). A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), she has is the Writer-in-Residence at UMBC and has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony.
Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is a lecturer in English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and was awarded a 2014 American Book Award. She has also won the Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem "54 Prince" was included in The Best American Poetry 2015.
