Lucia Perillo was born in Manhattan, New York on September 30, 1958. She received a bachelor's degree in wildlife management from McGill University in 1979 and went to work for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. She received a master's degree in English from Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainer National Park. She taught at Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, Saint Martin's University, and Warren Wilson College.
She was a poet and essayist. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1988 and published her first book, Dangerous Life, a year later. Her collections of poetry include Inseminating the Elephant, which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems. She was also the author of a book of essays entitled I've Heard the Vultures Singing and a short story collection entitled Happiness Is a Chemical on the Brain. In 2000, she received a MacArthur Genius fellowship. She died on October 16, 2016 at the age of 58.
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