Creative Writing Presents: Eileen Myles

Called "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature" (Dennis Cooper) and "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry" (The Boston Globe), Eileen Myles (they/them) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning writer, poet, novelist, performance artist, and art journalist. In 1992, they ran a write-in presidential campaign on a pro-queer/anti-bush platform and have produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. 

 As part of the Creative Writing Presents series, Myles will read from a “Working Life”  (2023), a rich new array of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems, and Pathetic Literature (2023), a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic.”

ABOUT EILEEN MYLES

 Eileen Myles (b. 1949, Cambridge, MA) is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing) (2020), Evolution (2019), Afterglow (a dog memoir) (2017), I Must Be Living Twice: new and selected poems (2015), and Chelsea Girls (1994). In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing, and was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Their super-8 puppet road film, The Trip (2019), can be seen on YouTube. Myles lives in New York and Marfa, TX, with a pit bull named Honey.

This program is presented by the Brandeis University English Department, co-sponsored by the Brandeis Library, Rose Art Museum, and the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, and made possibly by the Grossbardt Memorial Fund.