Patricia Fargnoli is the winner of the 1999 May Swenson Poetry Award and has also received the Robert Frost Literary Award, a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, has been in residences many times at the Dorset Writers Colony, and has received several other awards for her poetry. Her work has been published in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and many other literary journals.

About Necessary Light:

"Readers will discover many facets of Fargnoli’s voice . . . but I think the two attributes that will most impress readers are, first, the almost shimmering gladness with which Ms. Fargnoli replies to the gifts of beauty and of human love; and, second, the compassion with which she addresses whatever is beyond her own intimate surroundings. Whatever it costs her, whatever it takes, there seems to be for Ms. Fargnoli only one world and only one way to live within it: with a ferocity of attention, care, and response."
—Mary Oliver

"In Necessary Light, Pat Fargnoli proves that joy is not only possible, but that the highest joy is arrived at only after bearing the weight of experience through some terrifying valleys. Ms. Fargnoli’s heartening, disturbing, mature first book is rich with two things poetry can never have enough of: energy and wonder."
—Brendan Galvin