Eleni Sikelianos Biography

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

She is the author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (forthcoming from Coffee House Press, 2013), Body Clock (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).

She 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.

Her 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, Sikélianòs 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 now teaches in and directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver, and is on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program. She lives in Boulder with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter.