I will be reading with Eleni Sikelianos at the Loudon Nelson Center in Santa Cruz, California on October 3rd at 7:30 pm, room 5.
Poet Eleni Sikelianos, the great granddaughter of the Nobel-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, was briefly a biology student in her undergraduate career, drawn to oceanography and microbiology. Although those formal studies were abandoned, the language of wild oceanaria and cellular activity continues to inform her writing. As a young woman, Sikelianos spent nearly two years traveling (often by thumb) through Europe and Africa (from London to Ankara, and from Haifa to Dar-es-Salaam). She has lived in Paris, San Francisco, New York, Athens, and now, Boulder. In addition to Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008), her two most recent books are a long poem in and around the history and sites of her home state, The California Poem (Coffee House, 2004); and a hybridized memoir about her father, heroin, and homelessness, The Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights, 2004). Earlier books include The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, National Poetry Series prize, 2003), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN: April 2001), The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo) and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions). She has been conferred numerous awards for her poetry, nonfiction and translations, including the National Poetry Series, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, a Fulbright Writer’s Fellowship in Greece, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. She currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver, and spends her days with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter, Eva Grace.
