Eleanor Wilner

1937 –
Read poems by this poet

Eleanor Wilner (née Rand) was born in Cleveland on July 29, 1937, and holds an interdepartmental PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Wilner has published nine collections of poetry, including Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton University Press, 2019); Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Girl with Bees in  Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998); Otherwise (University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Sarah’s Choice (University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Wilner’s other works include a verse translation of Euripides’s Medea for the Penn Greek Drama Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and a book on visionary imagination and social change, Gathering the Winds (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Her work has appeared in more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1990, 2014, and  2016; The Open Door: 100 Poets, 100 Years of “Poetry” Magazine (University of Chicago Press, 2013), edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman; American War Poetry: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2006), edited by Lorrie Goldensohn; and The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Fourth Edition (W. W. Norton, 1996), edited by Margaret Ferguson and Mary Jo Salter.

About Wilner’s work, poet Tony Hoagland has said, “[Wilner] has a deep and heroic belief in the transformative power of language and myth. She paddles her surfboard outside the reef where most poets stop; she rides the big waves.”

Wilner has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2019 Frost Award from the Poetry Society of America for lifetime achievement; fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and three Pushcart Prizes. In 2022, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wilner was formerly an editor of American Poetry Review and was a guest editor for Ploughshares and the Pushcart Prize. She is an advisory editor for Calyx Press. She has taught at a dozen colleges and universities, including Morgan State University, Goucher College, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Smith College, University of Hawai’i, and Temple University, Japan Campus. She taught for thirty years on the graduate faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. Wilner lives in Philadelphia.