Poet Eleni Sikelianos to Judge 2014-2015 Madeline P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Contest at Lake Forest College

Acclaimed poet Eleni Sikelianos will serve as the final judge for next year’s Madeline P. Plonkser Emerging Writers Residency Contest. Each year, thanks to the generosity of Madeline Plonsker, Lake Forest College hosts an emerging writer under the age of 40 and has yet to publish a full-length book. The winner receives a $10,000 stipend, lives for two months on the campus of Lake Forest College as writer in residence, and upon approval by the editors, has his or her book published by the &NOW Books imprint of Lake Forest College Press, with distribution by Northwestern University Press.

Eleni Sikelianos has lived in Paris, San Francisco, New York (where she co-curated the Wednesday night reading series at The Poetry Project), Athens, and now, Boulder.  Her most recent book is The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013).  Forthcoming (June 2014) is You Animal Machine, a hybrid essay/poem/scrapbook/family history, with her burlesque-dancer grandmother as the central character. Sikelianos has written a long eco-poem in and around the history and sites of her home state, The California Poem (Coffee House, 2004); Body Clock, which incorporates sketches as in a lab-book; and a hybridized memoir about her father, heroin, and homelessness, The Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights, 2004).  Those books include images, and use various forms of investigative practices. Earlier books include The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, National Poetry Series prize, 2003); Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN: April 2001); The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo); and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions). Her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light appeared in 2009, and her translation of Sabine Macher’s notebook a will appear in 2014.  She has been conferred numerous awards for her poetry, nonfiction and translations, including the National Poetry Series, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, a Fulbright Writer’s Fellowship in Greece, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. She now teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver, where she founded and runs a Writers in the Schools program.