Poet Moira Egan reading from a book at a microphone.

A resident of Rome, Italy, Moira Egan earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and an MFA from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her graduate manuscript for the David Craig Austin Prize. 

Her most recent collection, Synæsthesium (2017), won The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Previous books published in the U.S. are Hot Flash Sonnets (2013); Spin (2010); Bar Napkin Sonnets (2009), which won the 2008 Ledge Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Cleave (2004).

In Italy, three bilingual collections, with translations by her husband, Damiano Abeni, have appeared: Olfactorium (2018), Botanica Arcana / Strange Botany (2014), and La Seta della Cravatta / The Silk of the Tie (2009). She has also translated (with Damiano Abeni) the work of several authors into Italian, including volumes by John Ashbery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright. 

Egan has had writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (as a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow), the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the James Merrill House. She teaches Creative Writing at the St. Stephen’s School in Rome.