Eleanor Lerman

Born in the Bronx, poet Eleanor Lerman grew up there and in Queens, New York. Her literary influences include Leonard Cohen and James Tate, and her poetry explores sexuality, loss, transformation, and the legacy of the 1960s. She has described her desire to “see what there is to say about aging in a time when the revolution we wanted did not happen but a lot of other unimaginable things did.”

Lerman’s debut poetry collection, Armed Love (1973), published when she was just 21, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her other books include Strange Life (2014); Lambda Literary Award finalist The Sensual World Re-Emerges (2010); Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (2005), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and The Mystery of Meteors (2001). She is also the author of the short story collections The Blonde on the Train and Other Stories (2009) and Observers and Other Stories (2002), as well as several novels, including Satellite Street (2019), The Stargazer’s Embassy (2017), and Radiomen (2017), winner of the John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction.

Lerman has received the Juniper Prize, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, and grants from the Puffin Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Long Beach, New York.