Diann Blakely Visiting Author: Elizabeth Willis

The Creative Writing Program welcomes Elizabeth Willis, the first visiting poet in the 2024 Blakely Program, with gratitude to the Diann Blakely Visiting Poet Fund.

Currently serving as Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England/L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008).
A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille.  Her poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Polish, and Slovak.