Elaine Terranova

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Elaine Terranova grew up in a working-class neighborhood and has held a variety of jobs: factory worker, office temp, preschool teacher, and editor. She taught at the Community College of Philadelphia, Temple University, the University of Delaware, and in the Rutgers, Camden MFA program. She is author of seven collections of poetry. Terranova’s first book, The Cult of the Right Hand (Doubleday), was chosen by Rita Dove for the 1990 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her second, Damages, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Another, Dollhouse, won the Off the Grid Prize in 2013. Perdido, 2018, is her most recent book. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and other magazines and anthologies. Recent prose and prose poems appear in Hotel Amerika, The Laurel Review, and Valley Voices. Terranova’s short memoir was runner-up for the 2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award. Her translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis is part of the Penn Greek Drama Series. Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, the Margaret Banister residency at Sweet Briar, the Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and and the Pew Center.