Elizabeth Twiddy

Elizabeth Twiddy's first full-length collection of poems is Love-Noise (Standing Stone Books, 2010), the electronic version of which won the Gold Medal in Poetry from the eLit Book Awards. She won The Joyce Carol Oates Award for Poetry from Syracuse University, and four of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. To date, two of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR program, "The Writer's Almanac" and she is currently featured in an interview on "The Writer's Almanac Bookshelf". She has a chapbook, Zoo Animals in the Rain (Turtle Ink Press, 2009). Most recently, her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, POOL, The Alembic, H_NGM_N, the Australian journal Skive, and elsewhere. She is on faculty, teaching poetry workshops and literature courses at the Syracuse YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center. Twiddy has been commissioned by the Society for New Music to write the libretto for an opera about Matilda Joslyn Gage--a project with which she is currently engaged. Twiddy holds degrees in Biochemistry and Chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University at University Park, where she designed and synthesized a molecule that aids in cancer detection. She began a Ph.D. in Pharmacology at Yale, then worked in research laboratories at the Dartmouth College Medical School before earning her MFA in Poetry at Syracuse University. She has taught writing and literature at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and at Le Moyne College, and has worked with students in the Syracuse City Schools on numerous projects, including the U.S. Poet Laureate Project, Literacy through Creative Expression. She lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband, the composer Edward Ruchalski, who has set a number of her poems to music for choir and for piano. For more, visit elizabethtwiddy.com.