University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Professor Elizabeth Willis has published a book of poetry, Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review of Books). The book was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

From the New York Review of Books website:

"American poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury."

Willis is a professor of poetry in the Writers’ Workshop, part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. 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).