Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 15, 2017.
Eileen Myles is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Snowflake/different streets, Sorry, Tree, Chelsea Girls, Not Me, Skies, Cool for You, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, and Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and coeditor of The New Fuck You/Adventures in Lesbian Reading. Her autobiographical novel Chelsea Girls, originally published in 1994 and reissued in 2015, brings together snapshot-like memories from her 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her difficult teen years, her committed embrace of lesbianism, and her life as a poet in 1970s New York, which she describes as “a glowing cord of drunkenness and sex.” Myles’s book I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975–2014, was described by John Ashbery as being “like a gasp of fresh air in the turbulent urban environment she writes from.” Myles has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She contributes to a wide number of publications, including ArtForum, Bookforum, Parkett, and The Believer. Myles lives in New York and Marfa, Texas, and is a professor emeritus at the University of California–San Diego.
This was a Readings and Conversations event.
In this episode, she is introduced by Dan Chiasson and then read from her work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.
You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.
