Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents Eileen Myles

Tuesday, December 1 @ 6:30 pm
Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space

About the artist:

Eileen Myles was born in Boston in 1949, attended catholic schools in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Since then she’s become widely known in writing circles, art circles, queer circles and beyond as one of the most restless interpreters of the American vernacular, moving fluidly from the poetry to writing novels, essays and plays, art reviews, performances and libretti, and perhaps most notably as someone “with an uncanny knack” as John Ashbery put it, “for making people feel uncomfortable and awake…chanting softly and beautifully the harsh if humorous realities that combine to make whatever life a poet can piece together today.” Eileen Myles's collection of essays “The Importance of being Iceland,” for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant is just out from Semiotext(e)/MIT. Eileen also writes novels (“Chelsea Girls, Cool for You”) and libretti (“Hell”) and many poems (“Sorry, Tree, Not Me”). She ran St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 80’s and in 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President. Eileen Myles is a Professor Emeritus of Writing & Literature at UC San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007. She lives in New York and will be reading from her newest book, “The Importance of being Iceland” For more information and excerpts of the work please visit
http://www.eileenmyles.com/iceland.php

Media contact:
sghanbari@ucsd.edu
858-822-7755