Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 and soon began reading their poems publicly, taking workshops at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York’s East Village and publishing in little magazines, zines and larger journals such as Partisan Review and Paris Review. Their books of poems include Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree. With Liz Kotz, they co-edited the notorious The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading, responding to the short-lived gay and lesbian publishing boom in the ’90s. Their first fiction was Chelsea Girls (1994), followed by Cool for You (a nonfiction novel) in 2000. They directed the writing program at the University of California at San Diego for five years, returning to New York in 2007. In San Diego they wrote the libretto for the opera Hell (composed by Michael Webster), performed in 2004-06. During that time they also wrote much of Inferno. For the last three decades they’ve been writing reviews, articles, essays and blogs, most recently in Art Forum, Parkett, Vice, AnOther Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. Their essays were collected in The Importance of Being Iceland (2009). In 2010, the Poetry Society of American awarded Myles the Shelley Memorial Award. The same year, they were the Hugo Writer at the University of Montana at Missoula. They live in New York.

INFERNO (A POET’S NOVEL) “I was completely stupefied by Inferno in the best of ways. In fact, I think I must feel kind of like Dante felt after seeing the face of God… I can tell you that Eileen Myles made me understand something I didn’t before. And really, what more can you ask of a novel, or a poet’s novel, or a poem, or a memoir, or whatever the hell this shimmering document is? Just read it.” — Alison Bechdel More