Dara Wier (born 1949) is an American poet and the author of eleven books of poetry, including most recently SELECTED POEMS from Wave Books. Awards include the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, Pushcart Prize, San Francisco Poetry Center Prize. Her work is in Best American Poetry and the Norton Anthology, American Hybrid. She has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2005 she held the Louis Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University
Wier has taught poetry writing workshops at Hollins University, the University of Alabama, Emory University, University of Idaho, University of Texa, University of Utah and Bennington College. She is on the permanent faculty, MFA Program for Poets & Writer University of Massachusett Amherst where she works with James Tate and Peter Gizzi. She also co-directs and co-founded the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action and The Juniper Summer Writing Institute.
Wier is a founding editor of Factory Hollow Press ( www.factoryhollowpress.com ). Factory Hollow Press is the publishing division of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute. Guy Pettit and Emily Pettit are co-founders and co-editors of Factory Hollow Press which publishes chapbooks, broadsides and full length collections, from its headquarters at Flying Object (founded in 2010 by Guy Pettit) (a non profit arts and community center, letterpress printing collective, gallery, and reading and performance space in Hadley, Massachusetts.
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Wier was born in Hotel Dieu in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised by her grandparents, Euphrasie Zeolide Barrois and Gerard Hippolyte Barrois, in Naomi, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish, and by her parents, Arthur Joseph Dixon and Grace Cecile Barrois Dixon in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. She was educated in Catholic schools in Algiers, La. and Gretna, La. until her parents, Grace Barrois Dixon and Arthur Joseph Dixon moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where she was schooled at St. Aloysius, and then St. Joseph's. She then attended Louisiana State University Wier received her MFA degree in poetry from Bowling Green University in 1974.
Dara Wier's work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry. Also in jubilat, FOU, Maggy, Make, Matters, American Poetry Reviw, Boston Review, Volt, Hollins Critic, Now Culture, LIT, Conduit, Bat City, Salt River, Telephone, OH NO, glitterpony, The Nation, Open City, notnostrums, The Blue Letter, Superstition Review, Fairy Tale Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, slope, Poetry Time, Ink Node, Sprung Formal, Lungful, Scythe, Tin House and other publications.