Ben Lerner is a writer and editor from Topeka, Kansas. He earned his BA and MFA from Brown University. Lerner served as a Fulbright scholar in Madrid and has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship.
Lerner’s published works include the poetry collections Angle of Yaw (2006), Mean Free Path (2010), and No Art (2016), the novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and The Topeka School (2019), and a monograph titled The Hatred of Poetry (2016), among others.
Lerner is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including No Art(2016); Mean Free Path (2010); Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award; and the sonnet sequence The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), which won the Hayden Carruth Award, was chosen by Library Journal as one of the year’s 12 best poetry books, and was a Lannan Literary Selection. His poetry has also been included in the anthologies 12×12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (2009), New Voices (2008), and Best American Poetry. His novels include The Topeka School (2019), 10:04 (2014), and Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). The Hatred of Poetry, his monograph, was published in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Currently, Lerner is a distinguished professor in the English Department at Brooklyn College.
Information from the Poetry Foundation.
