Eileen Myles

Passions

Vocation

American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." In 2012 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet. In New York she studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky. There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, who she admired and who became the subject of several of her poems and essays. In 1979 she worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler. In 1984 Myles was hired as the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and she invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach. During her tenure at St. Mark's, Myles performed "An American Poem" for the first time. Beginning in 2002, Myles began serving as a Professor of Writing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD); she directed the writing program for five years before she left. UCSD funded the research and travel grant that enabled the creation of Inferno (2010), as well as Hell, an opera composed by Michael Webster, for which Myles wrote the libretto. Since leaving UCSD in 2007, Myles has been a Visiting Writer at various educational institutions. In 2016, Myles endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in a Buzzfeed piece entitled "Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When The World Ends." Link to Wikipedia biography