Eileen Myles

EILEEN MYLES will be reading on Saturday, October 11, at the “Urban Village Arts Series” Music & Poetry Event

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, attended catholic schools in Arlington, MA, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971. For better or worse, she is one of the limited number of poets who are writing and thinking in a Boston accent today. In 1974, she moved to New York City to be a poet. She quickly gained the friendship of Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Alice Notley, and was the assistant to poet James Schuyler in the late seventies. More recently, through her friendship with the next generation of feminist and queer writers, most notably through touring with Sister Spit, she has become in the words of The New York Times “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde.” Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Harvard Review, Oink, Best American Poetr(ies), fort necessity, and dodgems. A virtuosic reader and performer, she has read and performed in bookstores, art galleries and museums, political rallies, and colleges across North America, Europe, Ireland, Iceland, and Russia. Myles is a firm believer that poetry most importantly belongs in the multitude of situations outside of the classroom. A prolific author, her more than twenty books of poetry and fiction, plays, performances, libretti, articles and films) and her cultural contributions (which include an openly female write in campaign for President in 1992) have made her enormously influential figure in literary, art, activist, and queer cultural circles. She’s a contributor to The Believer, Parkett, Bookforum and Art Forum, Art in America, Cabinet, The Nation, LTTR, The Village Voice and The Provincetown Banner. From 1984-86 she was Artistic Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project and from 2002 to 2007 she directed the writing program at UCSD. Upcoming titles include The Importance of Being Iceland (essays) (Semiotext(e)) for which she won a Warhol/Creative Capital grant and the much awaited Inferno, a poet’s novel. She lives and writes in New York.