Lucia Perillo

Lucia M. Perillo is an American poet and academic.

Life
Lucia Perillo grew up 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 an M.A. in English at Syracuse University, while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park.

She 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.

She suffers from Multiple sclerosis.

She now lives with her husband, James Rudy, in Olympia, Washington.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review.

Recognition
Her poetry collection Inseminating the Elephant was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Awards

 * 2000 MacArthur Fellow awards—bestowed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
 * 1997 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
 * PEN/Revson Foundation grant
 * Purdue University's Emery Poetry Prize