Lizzy Beck
About me
I’m a parent, partner, poet and teacher. I live with my family in Western Massachusetts, in a valley town from which I can see the mountains, although not the mountain which supposedly inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick, because that one is hidden by another mountain. I suspect in the winter the whale is white.
I already am...
At age four or five, I knew a lot more than I know now:
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Elisabeth: "Well, I don't know, because I already am what I want to be when I grow up: an artist! I made a whole book at my desk today. I just need to finish the back pages."
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Yes—those elusive back pages.
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I began graduate school in poetry when my first child (now in elementary school) was 11 weeks old. Much of my current work emerges from that messy concurrence: committing myself to my work and my family at once; deepening my poetic attention while re-forming my identity as a parent. My poems emerge from an imagination shaken and awakened by new motherhood, feeling its way toward connection—within the family and its roles, but also with a peacock, with patrons at Costco, with Macbeth, with the pages of a diary, with adolescent bullies, with string theory, with family ghosts, with an airplane seatmate who might never stop talking.
Formal bio
Lizzy Beck lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Pleiades, Rhino, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is a 2025 Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence.
