Eleni Sikelianos was born and grew up in California, and has lived in New York, Paris, Athens, and Colorado. She is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently What I Knew (Nightboat), and two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine). Sikelianos has been the happy recipient of many awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including two National Endowment for the Arts awards, the National Poetry Series, and Gertrude Stein Awards. Her writings have been widely anthologized and translated, with five books in French and two in Greek. She has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. Since 1998, she has been on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program and for many years taught in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she founded and ran the Writers in the Schools program. In 2017, she joined the Literary Arts faculty at Brown University.