Eleni Sikelianos

Eleni Sikelianos (born 1965) is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom.

She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Sikelianos is the great-granddaughter of the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, a former candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Eva Palmer-Sikelianos.

She was raised in California.

A high school dropout, she grew up on food stamps in California with a single mom, and graduated from the Naropa Institute with an MFA in Writing & Poetics.

Sikelianos works as Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

She was poet-in-residence at two homeless shelters in San Francisco in the early-to-mid 1990s and then taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City and literature and Bard College's Clemente Program.

She co-ran the Wednesday Night Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in St. Mark's Church.

She has also taught at Naropa, and the University of Denver, where Eryn Green, Carolina Ebeid and Jennifer Elise Foerster have been her students, among many others.

Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Rattapallax, Sulfur, Chicago Review, and Fence.

In an interview she gave with the California Journal of Poetics, Sikelianos discusses how zoology, cell biology, and marine biology became important to her early poetic sensibility.

She cites Lynn Margulis’ work in evolutionary symbiosis and the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thomas as influential."

She currently lives in Rhode Island with her husband, Laird Hunt, and their child.