Scholarship and Biography
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five poetry collections, most recently "SOFAR: Poems" (Persea, 2025) which contains poems published in "The Atlantic," "Poetry," "The Sun," and elsewhere. The others are "Interpretive Work" (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Audre Lorde Prize and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; "Approaching Ice" (Persea Books, 2010), a book of poems about Arctic and Antarctic exploration that was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; "Once Removed" (Persea Books, 2015) which holds poems shared in "The Slowdown" and "The New Yorker"; "Toward Antarctica" (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019) which was named a Top Ten Read by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operatrors; and "Theorem," a book-length collaboration with the visual artist Antonia Contro published in a fine art edition of 30 by Candor Arts in 2019 held in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Harvard Art Museums, and in 2020 by Poetry Northwest Editions in a trade edition.
She is also co-editor of two anthologies: "Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005 - 2020" (Provincetown Arts Press, 2022), "Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry" (Mountaineers Books, 2023), which uses science, cultural knowledge, poetry, and art to honor 128 beings in the Cascadia bioregion and which won a Pacific Northwest Book Award, a ForeWord Indies Gold and other awards.
Bradfield has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Ragdale, Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere.
In 2005, Bradfield founded Broadsided (broadsidedpress.org). A grassroots, virtual, collaborative publishing project, Broadsided pulls literary work out of journals and puts it on the streets. It brings words together with the energy of original visual art, publishing monthly collaborations on the website as pdfs that are then downloaded, printed, and posted around the world by "Vectors."
In addition to teaching poetry, Bradfield works as a naturalist/guide both locally on Cape Cod as well as on expedition ships in the high latitude, and she participates in research on whales and seals as a field assistant. This "other side" is an essential part of her poetic practice.
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