Andrea Scarpino

Andrea Scarpino is a contemporary American poet whose work engages deeply with themes of loss, inheritance, landscape, and the difficult terrain of personal history. Drawing on the Upper Midwest where she has lived and worked, and on the natural world as both subject and metaphorical ground, Scarpino writes poetry that is formally attentive and emotionally direct, concerned with how memory adheres to place and how the body carries what the mind struggles to articulate. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Ohio State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and has served as the Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Her debut collection Once (2014) established Scarpino as a poet of quiet, searching intensity, attentive to the small gestures and silences through which grief and longing make themselves known. The poems move with precision and restraint, finding in the natural world — its seasonal rhythms, its indifference, its particular beauties — a language adequate to human pain. Her follow-up collection The Grove Behind deepened these concerns, bringing a more expansive attention to ecology, family, and the layered meanings of terrain. Across these collections, Scarpino demonstrates a poet who is consistently learning from and responding to the land itself, treating the nonhuman world not as backdrop but as a co-equal presence.

Across the Wire continues her engagement with difficult histories, including family trauma and the political landscapes of working-class America. Scarpino’s poems are not confessional in any simple sense; they earn their emotional weight through precision of observation and a willingness to let complexity stand rather than resolve. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, reflecting a steady presence in contemporary American poetry. As Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, she has been a committed advocate for poetry in regional and underserved communities, bringing literary programming to audiences who might not otherwise encounter contemporary verse.

Scarpino’s poetry occupies an important place in the tradition of American landscape poetry while extending that tradition in directions that are personal, political, and ecological. Her work insists that the local and the particular — a grove behind a house, the specific light of a northern winter — carry within them the universal questions of how we grieve, how we remember, and how we continue. She teaches creative writing and remains an active voice in the literary communities of the Great Lakes region, contributing both through her own writing and through her sustained commitment to fostering poetry in the places she calls home.