Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." In 2012 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. 2Life and career 3Early life and education Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949, to a family with a working-class background. She attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971. Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet. In New York she participated in writing workshops held at St. Mark's Poetry Project, which promoted the idea of the "working artist," a pragmatic notion that Myles found appealing given her background; there she studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky, and was given a template for creating art in the context of an urban community. There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom she admired and who became the subject of several of her poems and essays. In 1979 she worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler. 3Artistic director of S