Eleni Sikelianos

Born and raised in California, Eleni Sikelianos, the great-grandaughter of the Nobel Prize-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, received an MFA in writing and poetics from the Naropa Institute.

Sikelianos is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023) and The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013). She is also the author of the memoir Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Sikelianos has received numerous honors and awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, and the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award.

For many years, Sikelianos taught poetry for Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York and California Poets in the Schools, working in public schools and with at-risk youth, as well as in homeless shelters and prisons. She has also taught in the creative writing program at the University of Denver and the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She currently teaches poetry in the literary arts department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.