Eleni Sikelianos

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a hybrid memoir (The Book of Jon, City Lights) and seven books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House, 2013). She has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Fellowships, The National Poetry Series, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Princeton University’s Seeger Fellowship, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, among others. In the summer of 2012, she performed parts of The California Poem with composer Philip Glass, set to his music. Her work has been widely anthologized (including in several Norton anthologies) and has been translated into a dozen languages. Sikelianos has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and is on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program and for L’Ecole de Litérature in France and Morocco. She currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, where she runs the Writers in the Schools program, and is frequently poet-in-residence at art centers and creative writing programs. The great granddaughter of Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and theater director Eva Palmer Sikelianos, she shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.

Eleni Sikelianos was nominated by Anne Waldman.