2024 Judge: Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation.
Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 22. Their newest collection of poems,
a “Working Life”, is out now. Their fiction includes
Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel,
Cool for You (2000),
Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and
Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume
The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include
Evolution (2018) and
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014.
Eileen Myles has received a Guggenheim, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, 3 Lambda Book Awards and a “Pioneer” lifetime achievement award, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they received a poetry award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2020 they got the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle and in 2022 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
First readers: Eloisa Amezcua, Bennet Bergman, Kyle Dacuyan, Kay Gabriel