About: Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles’ Inferno (a poet’s novel) came out last fall from orbooks.com. Alison Bechdel described inferno as “this shimmering document.” John Ashbery called it “Zingingly melancholy” and John Waters calls Eileen “…damn smart!” Her books of poetry include Skies, Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree. Chelsea Girls, her first fiction, appeared in 1994 followed by Cool for You (a nonfiction novel) in 2000. She’s a professor emeritus from UC, San Diego as well as being a legendary dyke poet. Her art essays and personal columns were collected in 2009 as The Importance of Being Iceland which got her a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. The Poetry Society of America gave her the Shelley Award in 2010. She writes for Bookforum, Artforum, Parkett, The Believer and Vice and publishes her poems in slews of journals etc. and in Best American Poetry a lot, for instance 2010.

Posts by Eileen Myles:

Being Female

Editor’s Note

You may have already read Eileen Myles’ essay “Being Female,” and so wonder why VIDA chose to reprint this piece in our first site update since releasing The Count 2010 pie charts. From the moment “Being Female” debuted this past Valentine’s Day in The Awl—one of many responses, in print and online, to VIDA’s count—links to Myles’ essay have shown up in all manner of blogs and social networking sites, and comment streams contain everything from effusive appreciation to scathing misogyny. In other words, this essay hit a nerve, the same nerve exposed by VIDA’s count. (more…)