Purpura was awarded a Millay Colony Fellowship, multiple fellowship residencies at The MacDowell Colony, and at Blue Mountain Center. She is the winner of the Visions International Prize in Translation, the Randall Jarrell Prize for poetry given by the North Carolina Writers’ Network and chosen by Mary Oliver, and, for The Brighter the Veil, The Towson University Prize in Literature, given by Towson University in MD in recognition of a literary work published that year by a writer under 40. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize numerous times, including this year.  Recently, she was Poet-in-Residence at The Chautauqua Institute and at The St. Mary’s Poetry Festival, St. Mary’s MD, a featured reader at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Palm Springs, CA, and a guest reader/lecturer at the First Annual Writers’ Conference at the University of North Carolina. She has served as judge for the AWP Intro Journals Award in Creative Nonfiction, and for the Gertrude Lucille Robinson Award for best undergraduate writing at Ohio State University.  Lia Purpura teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, where she lives with her husband and son.