Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, was educated in catholic schools, graduated from U. Mass. (Boston) in 1971, and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. She quickly became part of the reading, publishing, and performance scene in the East Village, editing dodgems in the late '70s and becoming part of the community of St. Mark's Poetry Project where she studied and was friends with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky. In 1979, she was assistant to poet James Schuyler. She was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project, 1984-86. Myles is a vivid interpreter of her own work and travels widely in the US and Canada and internationally giving readings and performances. In 2007, she published Sorry, Tree (Wave Books), the latest of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including Chelsea Girls, Not Me, Skies, The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, Cool for You, and The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. Her most recent book is Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) published by OR books. A new book of poems, Snowflake / different streets, will be published by Wave Books in 2011. She wrote the libretto for Hell, an opera with music composed by Michael Webster, which was performed on both coasts, 2004-2006. In 2007, she received The Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant. In 2010, the Poetry Society of America gave her the Shelley Memorial Award. She contributes to a wide number of publications including ArtForum, Bookforum, Parkett, and The Believer. She’s a Prof. Emeritus at UC San Diego where she taught for five years. She lives in New York.
