Eleni Sikélianòs

Eleni Sikélianòs is an American poet.

Life
She was raised in California. She graduated from the Naropa Institute with an M.F.A.

She taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City and teaches Literature and Bard College's Clemente Program. She co-ran the Wednesday Night Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in St. Mark's Church. She lived in New York City.

She currently lives in Colorado with her husband, Laird Hunt, and daughter Eva Grace. She teaches at Naropa, and the University of Denver.

Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Rattapallax, Sulfur, Chicago Review, and Fence.

She is the great-granddaughter of the renowned Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, a former candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews
Double Room: "This fall Eleni Sikelianos has come out with two new books, The California Poem (Coffee House Press) and The Book of Jon (City Lights). Sikelianos’s capacity to tune her writing instrument to greatly different projects is attested to not only by the genre of each work (The California Poem is a book-length poem and The Book of Jon is a (mostly) prose memoir), but also by the way that the two books look. The California Poem is, like its namesake states, large; it is 7 x 8 ½ inches in dimension, 200 pages in length. The Book of Jon, on the other hand, is quite small; it fits nicely into the back pocket of a pair of jeans. These differences are telling, for The California Poem is a great big epic, The Book of Jon an intimate family history."

Boston Review: "Eleni Sikelianos declares her collage poetics a third of the way into her patchwork memoir The Book of Jon: “None of these stories will stitch up into a seamless blanket to cover this family’s tracks. In this story, all the fissures show, they bulge scarlike, they come apart at the seams or they were never sewn up in the first place.” Toward the end of the next expansive sentence, she describes “the snaking lines of those beautifully colored cartographer’s maps coming unhinged from their borders and uncoiling away off the page, disappearing into the aethers.” Even her (mixed) metaphors appear pasted together from various texts, incorporating verbs of stitching, bulging, coming apart, snaking, unhinging, uncoiling and disappearing, while the nouns they move include a blanket, fissures, scars, seams, maps and pages. But what is oddest about this passage is Sikelianos’s definition of her family story as a narrative that might “cover this family’s tracks”—a history that conceals rather than reveals. This odd and troubling idea is the engine that drives her poetic memoir from ignorance to an untotalizing knowledge of kin and kind."

Jacket: "Earliest Worlds contains not one, but two ambitious volumes of poems: Blue Guide, and Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing''. Although the books share the balance of concentration and abandon necessary for their slightly increased speed of travel, the boundary between them is clearly defined, and either can be appreciated on its own. Together, they cover more ground than some careers."

Recognition

 * 2002 National Poetry Series (for The Monster Lives)
 * Seeger Fellow Princeton University
 * Yaddo residency
 * Maison des écrivains étrangers residency in Brittany,
 * Fulbright Writer's Fellowship in Greece
 * New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature
 * National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
 * two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing
 * New York Council for the Arts Translation Award
 * James D. Phelan Award for Blue Guide

Poetry

 * To Speak While Dreaming 1993
 * Poetics of the X (chapbook). 1995.
 * The Lover's Numbers (chapbook).
 * The Book of Tendons 1997.
 * From Blue Guide (chapbook). 1999.
 * Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001)
 * Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008)
 * Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008)
 * Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008)

Memoir

 * The Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights, 2004).