Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), won the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry. Her other books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995), and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Critical Quarterly, Hambone, The Nation, and A Public Space.

Willis has been awarded fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Howard Foundation and has held residencies at Brown University, University of Denver, Naropa University, the MacDowell Colony, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille. Her second book, The Human Abstract, was selected for the National Poetry Series. In 2007 she was awarded the Boston Review Prize for poetry. Her poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Polish, and Slovak.

Willis's work builds on a tradition of lyric innovation and open form. Her most recent projects are investigative in spirit, shifting increasingly toward hybrid genres and explicitly questioning the boundaries of literary representation. The visual sources of Turneresque (2003) range from the Romantic sublime to film noir. The prose poems of Meteoric Flowers (2006) mix pastoral romance with a critical engagement in the turbulent and heavily metaphorical language of contemporary culture. Address (2011) explores the collision of poetry, politics, and history in acts of public and private speech.

Willis has also written about 19th- and 20th-century poetry, focusing on the intersections of public and private life, the effects of politics and technology on aesthetic production, and the relation of poets to their sources. She holds a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo, where she wrote about Pre-Raphaelite modernism. Recently she edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008).

From 1998-2002 Willis was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mills College. Since 2002 she has taught at Wesleyan University, where she is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.