Writers’ Workshop professor, longlisted for National Book Award, ‘in love with Iowa City’

IOWA CITY — Described as gifted and masterful, lyrical and formidable, intricate while also capacious — Elizabeth Willis, since arriving on the University of Iowa campus a decade ago, has come to epitomize the iconic and esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in which she teaches and the wealth of writers among whom she continues to create.

“I love working with my students,” UI professor Willis said of the many Iowa City attractions that have kept her here after her 2014 arrival as a visiting poet. “These are people who are devoted to poetry as an art, and it's really exciting to work with them.”

As a young writer herself — decades before she would be become a Pulitzer Prize finalist, longlisted for the National Book Award, and included in Best American Poetry compilations, among many other awards — Willis had to learn from her own professor and mentor the devotion she admires in the students she now inspires.

“One thing I learned is that if you're committed to something and it feels right, then you need to insist on not turning away from it,” Willis said. “So I became more and more committed to the life of a poet and the life of the imagination, regardless of what I was doing for work — for paid labor.”

That concept began to gel when Willis was a student at State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1980s, where she learned under Robert Creeley — an American poet and contemporary of the likes of Allen Ginsberg and John Wieners.

Creeley imprinted on Willis as both a writer and professor.

“Rather than being himself, a person who had mastered an art and now can sort of relax and rest on his laurels, he saw himself as really in service to his art,” Willis said. “He saw his relation to the university as one that came with a responsibility to do as much good as possible with the resources that came with his position.”

Although dedicated today to developing her craft both personally and in up-and-coming poets under her professorship, Willis didn’t always predict poetry would be her full-time job.

“It just made sense to me as a way of processing the world and listening to the world and testing ideas about the world and paying attention to the world,” Willis said of her propensity toward poetry from the time she could write. “But I don't think I ever had the notion that it would become a professional commitment.”

Even as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Willis shopped for a more marketable major — despite her gravitational pull toward English.

“I did not declare my English major until my last semester, where I had taken all my classes,” Willis said. “I knew that I was going to have to make a living, and so I kept trying to major in something else.”

But an influential professor — in tune with Willis’ talent and hunger for the written word — suggested she pursue graduate school in New York.

“He had recently been to a conference at State University of New York at Buffalo, and he said, I think this is where you should go from here,” she said.

The professor had promised her a strong poetry community in and around the Buffalo campus, and that’s what she found — hooking Willis for a decade.

“It turned out that Buffalo, first of all, was a really inexpensive place to live, and it had a really vibrant arts and poetry community,” she said. “So even after I was no longer taking courses, I continued to live there and continued my education as a poet.”

‘Collective labor’

It was in Buffalo in 1993 that Willis at age 32 published her first book of poems — titled “Second Law” — through a small press of what felt like collaborators.

“What I love about poetry is there’s usually a thin line between poets and those producing the work and those who are editing and publishing it,” she said. “There is this natural sense of being part of a collective labor.”

Her second book — “The Human Abstract” — won the National Poetry Series in the mid-1990s, attracting a much larger publisher: Penguin.

“I had the sense that I had joined a major league baseball team,” Willis said of her experience with Penguin and its “widespread cultural cache” — helping her answer the nagging question her career path had until that point posed.

“What will my parents understand about what I do?” Willis asked. “Well they could understand I was published by a press they recognized.”

Having earned her doctorate of poetics around the same time, Willis leapfrogged from coast to coast through visiting professorships at Providence College in Rhode Island to Mills College in Oakland, Calif. and back east to Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Accumulating fellowships, honors, and prizes along the way — including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 — the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2014 invited her to visit as a professor for a semester, promising Willis a return to her Midwestern roots.

Although born in Bahrain, Willis largely was raised in Wisconsin — where she began processing at an early age the American landscape and settlement and power dynamics, all which would surface in her award-winning poetry over time.

“I kind of fell in love with Iowa City,” Willis said of her decision to take a permanent position with the workshop in 2015. “So when I was invited back, I happily accepted.”

‘So many lovely people’

About what she loved of the UI community, Willis said, “so many things” — including its ability to offer both a small town feel and a wealth of artistic opportunity.

“I was really aware of the ways that communities that are not recognized as major art centers, but somehow have a lot of artists and writers living in them, are overlooked but have this kind of perfect mix of a lot of exciting things to do and not too many people clamoring to be there,” Willis said. “And Prairie Lights Books was a really, really big draw — seeing the way that the writing community gathered there, and the fact that there are so many people who are great readers in the city.

“And I just met so many lovely people here.”

Shortly after starting in her permanent UI role, Willis was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry — which she learned about from her colleagues.

“I thought they were making a joke,” she said. “It was not on my radar at all.”

That honor was for “Alive: New and Selected Poems” — which she published in 2015.

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And nearly a decade later, Willis last year was longlisted for the National Book Award for “Liontaming in America” — which ties together threads from both American history and her own, including the Mormon religion she was born into and her Midwestern roots.

“This book is not a memoir,” she wrote. “Its memories are not mine.”

Although Willis’ personal attachment to Iowa City didn’t come until later in life, she said her roots run deep — with a great-great-aunt moving to town in 1849 after marrying a Johnson County pharmacist.

When he died, Willis said, her aunt married Ezekiel Clark — an Iowa City-based state senator in the 1800s.

“Grant Wood has a role in my book as well,” she said. “In many ways, I think that my move to Iowa City was crucial in bringing a lot of the book’s threads together.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

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