Ben Lerner

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Ben Lerner is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Noting his use of “arresting lines that are comical, anxious and hauntingly true,” Boston Review critic Craig Morgan Teicher described Lerner’s aim in Angle of Yaw to “juxtapose discordant elements of noise such that their collective racket cancels each component out, leaving behind a language purged by negation—refreshed, defiant, and wholly self-aware.”

Lerner’s sonnet sequence, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), won the Hayden Carruth Award, was chosen by Library Journal as one of the year’s 12 best poetry books, and was a Lannan Literary Selection. His poetry has also been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry, New Voices (2008), and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (2009).

Also a fiction writer and essayist, Lerner’s novels include Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). He earned a B.A. in political science and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. He has served as a Fulbright scholar in Madrid and as a Guggenheim fellow. Lerner has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts.