Alexandria Peary Biography

The child of a German mother and American father, Alexandria Peary grew up in the country store her parents owned in central Maine. She earned a BA at Colby College, MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a PhD in Composition from the University of New Hampshire. Her poetry collections include Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (2008), Lid to the Shadow (2011), which won the Slope Editions Book Prize, and Control Bird Alt Delete (2014), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Peary’s work has been influenced by a variety of figures and sources, from Carl Jung to Emily Dickinson to Buddhist mindfulness practice. She lives a few miles from one of the Robert Frost homesteads in New Hampshire, and her work explores the landscape of New England as well as metalanguage, archetype, and alternative ways of knowing. Laura Mullen said of Peary that she is “one of those wonderful writers who know how to stay, as de Kooning put it, ‘on the edge of something.’”

Peary’s honors include the Joseph Langland Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Mudfish Poetry Prize, and the Mary Carver Poetry Prize. She teaches at Salem State University.