Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner
Born (1979-02-04) February 4, 1979
Topeka, Kansas
Nationality United States
Alma mater Brown University
Genre Poetry, novels, essays
Notable awards Guggenheim Fellowship;
Believer Book Award;
MacArthur Fellowship

Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor.[1] Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016. [2]

Life and work

Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. He is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School, where he participated in debate and forensics, winning the 1997 National Forensic League National Tournament in International Extemporaneous Speaking.[3] At Brown University he earned a B.A. in political theory and an MFA in poetry.

Lerner was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of 52 sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures.[4] In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry.

He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006. It was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Lerner's third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.[5][6]

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, published in 2011,[7] won the Believer Book Award.[8] and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize. Writing in The Guardian, Geoff Dyer described Leaving the Atocha Station as "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future."[9] Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review.[10] Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggie Nelson called 10:04 a "near perfect piece of literature."[11] His essays, art criticism, and literary criticism have appeared in Art in America, boundary 2, Frieze, Harper's, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker among many other publications.[12]

In 2008, Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication.[13] In 2016, he became the first poetry editor at ''Harper's''.[14] He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.[15]

Lerner received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.[16]

Lerner's mother is the psychologist Harriet Lerner.[17]

Works

Poetry

Fiction

Nonfiction

The Hatred of Poetry. FSG Originals, 2016.

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 "Stadt Münster: Kulturamt – Lyrikertreffen". Muenster.de. Archived from the original on 17 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  2. http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2016/06/27/cuny-trustees-approve-new-labor-contracts/
  3. Blankenship, Bill (March 9, 2005). "Young poet to read works at Washburn". The Topeka Capital-Journal. Retrieved May 7, 2014.
  4. The Paris Review. "Ben Lerner's First Time". The Paris Review. Retrieved June 27, 2016.
  5. In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection, Mean Free Path are full of discrete collisions—stutters, repetitions, fragmentations, recombinations—that track how language breaks up or changes course under the emotional pressure of the utterance.
  6. "Ben Lerner". Narrative Magazine. Archived from the original on 14 July 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  7. 1 2 "Ben Lerner Wins The Believer Book Award". Retrieved 22 March 2016.
  8. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/05/leaving-atocha-station-ben-lerner
  9. 1 2 The Paris Review. "Emma Cline Wins Plimpton Prize; Ben Lerner Wins Terry Southern Prize". The Paris Review. Retrieved 22 March 2016.
  10. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/95063
  11. 1 2 http://www.gf.org/fellows/17431-ben-lerner
  12. "The 'angle of immunity': face and façade in Beckett's Film – GAVIN – 2008 – Critical Quarterly – Wiley Online Library". .interscience.wiley.com. 2008-04-16. Archived from the original on 22 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  13. http://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/the-drums-of-marrakesh/
  14. "Brooklyn College English Department – MFA Faculty". Depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  15. "Ben Lerner — MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2015-09-29.
  16. Link (2006-12-05). "Silliman's Blog". Ronsilliman.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  17. "FSG's Favorite Books of 2013". Work in Progress. Retrieved 22 March 2016.
  18. Archived March 15, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
  19. "Acclaimed young poet Ben Lerner relocates to Pittsburgh. – Books – Book Reviews & Features – Pittsburgh City Paper". Pittsburghcitypaper.ws. Archived from the original on 14 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  20. "National Book Award 2006". Nationalbook.org. Archived from the original on 16 July 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  21. "Poetry Flash:NCBRAwards". Poetry Flash.
  22. "New Fellows". Brown.edu. Archived from the original on 7 June 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  23. "Book Prizes – Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Los Angeles Times". Los Angeles Times.
  24. "The New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalists Announced". Flavorwire. 14 March 2012. Retrieved 22 March 2016.
  25. http://library.stanford.edu/saroyan/shortlistsrelease2012.html
  26. "Finalist for the 2012 PEN/Bingham Award". Star Tribune.
  27. http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/events/tait-black/shortlist
  28. http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-folio-prize-shortlist-includes-ben-lerner-colm-toibin-ali-smith-20150209-story.html

External links

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