Elisabeth Murawski

Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Zorba’s Daughter (Utah State University Press, 2010), which won the May Swenson Poetry Award, Moon and Mercury (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1990), and two chapbooks: Troubled by an Angel (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997) and Out-patients (Serving House Books, 2010). Heiress, a runner-up for the X.J. Kennedy Prize, will be published in the fall of 2018 by Texas Review Press. Nearly three hundred poems have been published in journals or online. Publications include The Yale Review, FIELD, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, and The Southern Review. For individual poems she has won the Gabriela Mistral Poetry Prize (2016), the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Prize (2015), the Mudfish 11 Prize (2011), Phyllis Smart-Young Prize (2011), Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Award (2011) and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (2006). She has received ten Pushcart Prize nominations.

Born and raised in Chicago, an alumna of De Paul University, she earned an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. She has received grants from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, a residency from the Achill Heinrich Boll Association, and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Employed 28 years as a training specialist for the U.S. Census Bureau before retiring in 2005, she has conducted poetry workshops as an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia (Falls Church campus) and Johns Hopkins University (Washington Center). She currently resides in Alexandria, VA.

Selected Links

Winning poem in Mudfish Competition (Judge: Charles Simic)
'For Edward Thomas' in The Yale Review
'Dirge': poem in Virginia Quarterly
'Hardy's Fiddle': audio of a poem by Elisabeth Murawski at RHINO 
'Hopkins Room': poem by Elisabeth Murawski which received an Honorable Mention in the Poetry of the Sacred Competition  
“Iconic Photo: Lee Miller in Munich, April, 1945”: first prize in the 2015 University of Canberra’s International Poetry Prize
‘The Barn” in Blackbird