Eileen Myles, Poetry Reading at Beinecke Library
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, public talker and art journalist. Their twenty-one books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You and I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, a poetry grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Shelley Prize from the PSA. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they’ll be teaching at NYU and Naropa University and they live in New York City and Marfa, TX.
Poet, novelist, performer and art journalist Eileen Myles is the author of twenty-one books including evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), I Must Be Living Twice: new & selected poems and a re-issue of Chelsea Girls in 2015. Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1949, attended Catholic schools in Arlington, MA and graduated from U. Mass (Boston) in 1971. They came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Their education primarily took place at St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1975 to 1977, through attending readings and participating in workshops led by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Bill Zavatsky and Paul Violi. From 1984 to 1986 Eileen was the artistic director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
From 1977 to 1979 they published dodgems, a poetry magazine that represented a collision of New York School, Language Poetry, performance texts, unconventional prose, as well as tossed-off notes from neighbors and celebrities (Lily Tomlin.)
In 2004, they wrote the libretto for the opera Hell, composed by Michael Webster. In 2010, they created and directed for the Dia Center for the Arts a performance piece, The Collection of Silence, which involved dancers, poets, children, visual artists, and Buddhists in a collective public act of silence at the Hispanic Society in New York.
In 2016 Eileen Myles began showing the photos they had been posting on Instagram at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA. In 2018-2019 they are showing photos at Bridget Donahue Gallery in NYC. See details on the ‘gigs’ page here.
Eileen has contributed to a wide number of publications including BookForum, and ArtForum, the Village Voice and Art in America, The New Yorker, Harpers, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The New York Times, The Nation, Playboy and The Poetry Project Newsletter and New York Magazine. They’ve contributed essays to catalogs for individual artists such as Donald Judd, Kathy Bradford, Shannon Ebner, Marilyn Minter, Zoe Leonard and Jack Pierson.
Myles has been reading and talking and presenting their work in festivals, at colleges and galleries, museums and bookstores all over North America, South America, Europe, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand since the early 1980s.
Eileen Myles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction, a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and received a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016 they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they’ll teach at Naropa University, and NYU. They live in New York City and also have a home in Marfa, TX.