Erica Funkhouser

Poet and playwright Erica Funkhouser grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Stanford University. She has published several collections of poetry, including Post and Rail (2018), Earthly (2008), Pursuit (2002), and Natural Affinities (1983). In a review of Earthly, Publishers Weekly praised her as “a poet of observation, one who looks steadily, patiently, and respectfully at the things, both built and natural, of this world.” Utilizing both free verse and formal constraint, Funkhouser engages her subjects with a quiet, precise lyricism.

“I think I don’t really know who I am, or what I think, or what I believe unless I’m in the process of writing,” she said in a 2007 interview with the Boston Globe. “That’s where all of my discovery takes place, that’s where all of my confrontation takes place—I would say not just with my own interior life but with the exterior life, the rest of the world.” Funkhouser has been honored as a Literary Light by the Boston Public Library and has also received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Essex, Massachusetts.