Eleni Sikelianos

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

She is the author of Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023); The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013), Body Clock (Coffee House Press, 2008), The Book of Jon (City Lights Publishers, 2004), The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, 2003), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001), The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions, 1993).

Sikelianos has received numerous honors and awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, 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.

Sikelianos’s work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has participated in a number of international poetry festivals, including the Centre National du Livre's Belles Etrangères reading tour of France, the Days of Poetry and Wine in Slovenia, the Barcelona Poetry Festival, and Metropole Bleu in Montreal.

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 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.