Eleni Sikelianos

Born and raised in California, Eleni Sikelianos, the great-granddaughter of the Nobel Prize–nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and theater director Eva Palmer Sikelianos, received an MFA in writing and poetics from the Naropa Institute, where she studied with Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman.

Sikelianos is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023) and The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013). She is also the author of a trilogy of hybrid memoirs, the most recent being Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026). Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and she has translated three books from the French by Mohamed Leftah, Sabine Macher, and Jacques Roubaud.

Sikelianos has received numerous honors and awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and residencies at Princeton University as a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Brittany, and at Yaddo. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship 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.

For many years, Sikelianos taught poetry for Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and for California Poets in the Schools, working in public schools and with at-risk youth as well as in homeless shelters and prisons. She has also taught in the creative writing program at the University of Denver and is a frequent guest at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. She currently teaches poetry in the literary arts department at Brown University.