Eric Leigh received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where he was honored with Hopwood Awards in both poetry and non-fiction. His recent honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the New Letters Prize for Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. He has been a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Samuel French Morse Prize, and the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Books by Eric Leigh:

About Harm’s Way:

"‘The country poor used to mark graves / with their best piece of china—chipped bowl / butter dish,’ their tribute a form of ensoulment. And the poet who beholds this gesture in all its native eloquence has made of it an ars poetica. I know no writer whose vision is more generous, more inclusive than that of Eric Leigh. The thirteen-year-old girl who feeds a houseful of siblings on dandelion greens, the machinist working the midnight shift, the drag queen, the barman, the heroin addict on the bus: poetry cannot keep them from harm, but it can, in the deft hands of Leigh, endow them with mortal radiance."
—Linda Gregerson

"Eric Leigh writes of loss in poems that are deeply moving and yet unsentimental. Reading his first collection, Harm’s Way, I’m struck by his intensity and eloquence. He has the charm of a storyteller with a wide range of settings. . . . A sequence, ‘The Dark-Light of Spring,’ courageously recounts a violent family death. The title poem has me enthralled."
—Grace Schulman