Orion Authors Aloud: Lia Purpura reads “On Coming Back as a Buzzard”

By Lia Purpura

Audio of the author reading her essay from the September/October 2009 issue of Orion, about the beautiful necessity of an appetite for all things.

Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, and The Brighter the Veil), three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations, (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash). In addition to a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, Lia Purpura has also been awarded an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review,Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.