Moira Egan was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and lived in New York, Ireland, and Greece before moving to Rome in 2007. She has a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College (German Literature Major, Art History Minor); an M.A. from The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University; and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her graduate manuscript for the David Craig Austin Memorial Prize.
Moira’s poems and prose have appeared in journals and anthologies on four continents, in such publications as Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, Poems of Rome, and many others. She has published five collections of poems in the United States and four bilingual collections in Italian. Her most recent book is Amore e morte: Poesie nuove e scelte (Edizioni Tlon, 2022), a bilingual New & Selected featuring translations by her husband, Damiano Abeni.
Along with Damiano, her husband and translating partner, Moira has published numerous volumes in translation in Italy. Poetry translations include books by John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ben Lerner, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Ocean Vuong, and Charles Wright. Prose translations include works by John Barth, Aimee Bender, Sheila Heti, and Josephine Tey.
Moira has held writing fellowships at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Malta; the Civitella Ranieri Center; the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center; and the James Merrill House. She has also been a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow and a CSG Endowment Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Obviously, Moira loves reading and writing poems — and prose as well — but she also considers herself very fortunate to be able to teach Creative Writing. She believes that becoming an ever-stronger reader of good literature is one of the most important ways to continue to grow as a writer. Her classes emphasize close reading, open discussion, and constructive criticism that is always kind and considerate. Her main goal as a professor is helping students to find and ever refine their own individual voices.
