Eleni Sikelianos has two new books out this fall: The California Poem, a book-length exploration of growing up in her home state, from Coffee House Press; and The Book of Jon, a media-rich meditation on the nature of drug addiction, daughterhood, and death, from City Lights. Eleni’s previous books are The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls, Earliest Worlds, The Book of Tendons, The Lover's Numbers, and To Speak While Dreaming. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Poetry Series (for The Monster Lives), residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow and at Yaddo and the Maison des écrivains étrangers in Brittany, a Fulbright Writer's Fellowship in Greece, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, a New York Council for the Arts Translation Award, and the James D. Phelan Award for Blue Guide. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including Grand Street, Sulfur, Chicago Review, and Fence.

Eleni has spent a fair amount of her life traveling by foot, thumb, train, boat and plane (including sixteen or so months hitchhiking across Europe and Africa: London to Istanbul, Cairo to Nairobi; trips to Mexico City, Oaxaca, the Yucatan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur; many trips to Greece; and a few years in France).

She currently lives in Colorado with her husband, the fiction writer Laird Hunt, and teaches in the MFA program at Naropa in Boulder, and in the Creative Ph.D. program at the University of Denver.