Gail Mazur

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Gail Mazur’s poetry asks the fundamental questions of a life animated by a social and existential conscience. Her work explores the intersection of politics, high and low culture, and personal life with its hopes, exultation, and despair.

While at the Radcliffe Institute, Mazur will work on completing her sixth collection, a group of poems that includes layered narratives of personal and political history, a meditation on the urge to make art, and confronting irrevocable loss.

Mazur is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson College. Her five previous books of poetry include Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2005), which won the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her fourth book, They Can’t Take That Away from Me (University of Chicago Press, 2001), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Mazur’s poems have been widely published and anthologized, and she has lectured and given poetry readings across the country. She has been a visiting professor at the graduate writing programs of the University of Houston and the University of California at Irvine. Mazur is the 2005 recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award.