Alexandria Peary

The child of a German mother and an American father, Alexandria Peary grew up in the convenience 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 English from the University of New Hampshire. Her poetry collections include Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (Backwaters Press, 2008), Lid to the Shadow (Slope Editions, 2011), Control Bird Alt Delete (University of Iowa Press, 2014), The Water Draft (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). Peary’s other books include Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century with Tom C. Hunley (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015) and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (Routledge, 2018).

Peary’s work has been influenced by various figures and sources, including Carl Jung, Emily Dickinson, visual artists Gregory Gillespie and Ai Weiwei, and Buddhist mindfulness practice. Peary lives a few miles from Robert Frost’s New Hampshire homestead, and her work explores the landscapes of New England, metalanguage, intertextuality, and social media. Of the verbal still life and trompe l'oeil in The Water Draft, Paul Hoover said Peary “comments through a fourth wall window to address the reader, and poetry itself is one of the guests at table.” Of Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak, Ira Sadoff said, “I’ve never seen the intertextual used so well in poetry, with ancestors like Ashbery and Kristeva married to one another in an old Chevy Impala with the deer scattering on the side of the road.” 

Peary specializes in mindful writing to alleviate apprehension and writing blocks. She believes every moment can be a prolific moment for everyone, a concept she covered in her TEDx talk, “How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Think About Writing.” 

Peary’s honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, a Slope Editions Book Prize, and a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She teaches in the English Department at Salem State University, where she received the 2021 Outstanding Faculty Award. In 2019, she was appointed poet laureate of New Hampshire.