Ben Lerner

Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

Life and work
Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. He is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School, where he participated in debate and forensics, winning the 1997 National Forensic League National Tournament in International Extemporaneous Speaking. At Brown University he studied with poet C. D. Wright and earned a B.A. in political theory and an MFA in poetry.

Lerner was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of 52 sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures.
In 2004 Library Journal named it one of the year's 12 best books of poetry.

In 2003 Lerner traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain, where he wrote his second book of poetry, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006. It was named a finalist for the National Book Award. His third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, published in 2011, won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize. Writing in The Guardian, Geoff Dyer called it "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future." Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggie Nelson called 10:04 a "near perfect piece of literature." Lerner's 2019 novel, The Topeka School, was acclaimed in The New York Times Book Review as "a high-water mark in recent American fiction." Lerner’s essays, art criticism, and literary criticism have appeared in Art in America, boundary 2, Frieze, Harper's, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication. In 2016 he became the first poetry editor at Harper's. He has taught at California College of the Arts and the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

In 2016 Lerner became a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.

Lerner's mother is the psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Bibliography

Poetry
 
 
 
  Collection of previous three volumes.

Novels 
 Leaving the Atocha Station, Coffee House Press, 2011. 
 10:04, Faber and Faber, 2014. 
 The Topeka School, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019.

Short fiction 

Stories

Non-fiction
The Hatred of Poetry. FSG Originals, 2016.

Collaborations with artists
Blossom. Mack Books, 2015. With Thomas Demand.
The Polish Rider. Mack Books, 2018. With Anna Ostoya.
The Snows of Venice. Spector Books, 2018. With Alexander Kluge

Awards
 2003 – Hayden Carruth Award
 2003–2004 – Fulbright Fellowship
 2006 – Finalist, National Book Award for Angle of Yaw.
 2006 – Finalist, Northern California Book Awards for Angle of Yaw
 2007 – Kansas Notable Book for Angle of Yaw
 2010–2011 – Howard Foundation Fellowship
 2011 – Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie
 2011 – Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction
 2012 – Finalist, Young Lions Prize of the New York Public Library
 2012 – The Believer Book Award
 2012 – Finalist, William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
 2012 – Finalist, PEN/Bingham Award
 2013 – Finalist, James Tait Black Memorial Prize
 2013 – Guggenheim Fellowship
 2014 – Terry Southern Fiction Prize from The Paris Review
 2014 – Finalist, Folio Prize
 2017 - named one of Granta's best young American novelists
 2015– Winner, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

References

External links 
An essay about The Topeka School and Lerner's other novels at Harper's
An excerpt from The Topeka School at The New Yorker
Lerner's page and the MacArthur Foundation
Interview with Ariana Reines in Bomb Magazine
 Lerner's page at the Guggenheim Foundation
 Lerner's National Book Award page
 Lerner's page at Narrative magazine
 Interview with Lerner in The New Yorker
 Interview with Lerner in The Believer
 Interview with Lerner in Bookforum
 Interview with Lerner in The Huffington Post
 Audio of Lerner poetry reading
 "My First Time" interview with Lerner by The Paris Review

Category:1979 births
Category:Living people
Category:21st-century American male writers
Category:21st-century American novelists
Category:21st-century American poets
Category:American male novelists
Category:American male poets
Category:Believer Book Award winners
Category:Brooklyn College faculty
Category:Brown University alumni
Category:Harper's Magazine people
Category:MacArthur Fellows
Category:The New Yorker people
Category:Novelists from New York (state)
Category:Novelists from Pennsylvania
Category:University of Pittsburgh faculty
Category:Writers from Topeka, Kansas