(no-name)
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Lizzy Beck lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of Brooder, forthcoming from Texas Review Press. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Terrain.org, SWWIM and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Lizzy has served as an Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence at The Mount and a Yotzer Fellow at Yetzirah’s annual conference. Her work was awarded the Larry Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers and was selected as runner-up for TRP’s X.J. Kennedy Prize. With support from the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowship, Lizzy is also translating the poems of the Soviet Yiddish writer Rokhl Boymvol. Earlier in her life, Lizzy worked in children’s book publishing, farming (vegetables in New England, chickens in Hawaii), and boarding school teaching. Her favorite Shakespeare play is Macbeth.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
It may be that I am a Jewish writer because I am a Jewish reader. My first experiences of close reading took place in my childhood synagogue (Bnai Keshet, in Montclair, NJ). I learned there that even the texts that we hold most dear, that we read again and again, can be examined ever more deeply, discussed and debated, and used to understand our lives in new ways. A spirit of attention and inquiry drives my work, and that feels to me like a Jewish quality of mind. It may be that the humor and tenderness and darkness in my poems are Jewish as well. When these answers have felt too tenuous, I’ve turned to Yiddish to try to invite a connection with the language and literature of my forebears.
Published Works
Brooder (TRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2028)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Terrain.org, \”At the Neighbor\’s Farm, Our Son Begs the Peacock to Open His Tail\”— https://www.terrain.org/2025/poetry/lizzy-beck/
Salamander Magazine, \”Quantum Physics at the San Diego Zoo\” — https://salamandermag.org/quantum-physics-at-the-san-diego-zoo/
SWWIM Every Day,\”Plenty\”— https://www.swwim.org/swwimeveryday/2025/3/20/plenty
Education
Yale University, BA in English, 2010
MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, MFA in Poetry, 2020