Lee Upton writes in multiple genres. Her comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, set at two literary conferences ten years apart, is due out in 2025 from Sagging Meniscus. A third novel, The Withers, asks questions about how self-trust can be reclaimed even in the most unjust and horrifying circumstances, and will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. A sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming: Tabitha, Stay Up.
Lee Upton is also the author of two collections of short stories, Visitations: Stories, and The Tao of Humiliation; a sixth collection of poetry, Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles (CSU Poetry Center 2015); and Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo 2012). She authored Ambrosia, an e-book story published digitally in the Working Titles series from The Massachusetts Review, and an award-winning novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, as well as four books of literary criticism.
Her fourth book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson, explores how poets claim and express distinctive styles and sensibilities. Her other books of literary scholarship are The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets; Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan; and Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude.
Her first collection of stories, The Tao of Humiliation, received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal as well as highly favorable reviews from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. Kirkus selected the collection for their listing of “The Best Books of 2014,” one of eleven books in the subcategory of short stories that included collections by a slate of international authors, among them Paul Theroux, Tove Jansson, and Hilary Mantel. Her second collection, Visitations, was also a recipient of the
Kirkus Star and listed in “Best of the Indies 2017.”
Lee Upton's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and in three editions of The Best American Poetry and in The New Yorker, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Dublin Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, and other magazines. More than six dozen of her short stories have been published or are forthcoming, appearing in such journals as Antioch Review, STORY, Bennington Review, World Literature Today, Ecotone, Epoch, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Short Fiction (England), Redivider, Cincinnati Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Ascent, New Ohio Review, and Notre Dame Review. Her writing has been recognized as noteworthy in listings in editions of Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Best American Essays. She has published over seventy articles and essays about literature. She publishes aphorisms as well, and has had the good fortune to collaborate with visual artists, including Ed Kerns, Curlee Holton, Jim Toia, and Thom Crawford on artist books and other media.
The composer Kirk O’Riordan’s opera, The Masque of Edgar Allan Poe, with a libretto written by Lee Upton, was given a fully staged performance at the University of Delaware and at Lafayette College in 2016.
Her awards include the Open Book Award from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center; the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award; the BOA Short Fiction Award; and the ForeWord Review Book of the Year Award in the category of writing for Swallowing the Sea.
She was awarded the Mary Louise VanArtsdalen Prize for Scholarship, the Marquis Teaching Award, the Jones Award, and the Jones Faculty Lecture Award at Lafayette College. She has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a PhD in English from Binghamton University. She was named the Francis A. March Professor Emerita and Writer in Residence at Lafayette College.
CONTACT: uptonlee@lafayette.edu
