Lucia Perillo


Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet.
In 2000, Perillo was recognized with a "genius grant" as part of the MacArthur Fellows Program.

Life and career

Perillo was born in Manhattan on September 30, 1958 and grew up in Irvington, in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management, and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park, and moved to Olympia, Washington in 1987, where she taught at Saint Martin's College. For most of the 1990s, Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University.
Her work has appeared in many magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Kenyon Review among others. A traditional poet of mostly free-verse personal reflection, she has written extensively about living with multiple sclerosis in her poems and essays. On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths is her most recent book of poetry. In 2012 she also published a collection of short fiction, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, which was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She died on October 16, 2016 in Olympia, Washington, aged 58.

Awards

;Collections
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Blacktail2014

Non-fiction

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