Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan UP, 2011), won the PEN New England Winship Award for Poetry. Her other books include Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan UP, 2006), Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), and The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995), which won the National Poetry Series. Willis’s work builds on a tradition of lyric innovation and open form. Her most recent projects are investigative in spirit, shifting increasingly toward hybrid genres and explicitly questioning the boundaries of literary representation. The prose poems of Meteoric Flowers  mix pastoral romance with a critical engagement in the turbulent and heavily metaphorical language of contemporary culture. Address explores the collision of poetry, politics, and history in acts of public and private speech. Willis has been awarded fellowships in poetry from the California Arts Council and the Howard Foundation and has held residencies at Brown University, University of Denver, Naropa University, the MacDowell Colony, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille. From 1998 to 2002 Willis was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mills College. Since 2002 she has taught at Wesleyan University, where she is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.

Follow this link to listen to Elizabeth Willis — “In Strength, Sweetness” — A reading at St Mark’s Church, November 30, 2011.