Ben Lerner | |
|---|---|
 Lerner in 2015 | |
| Born | Benjamin S. Lerner February 4, 1979 Topeka, Kansas, U.S. |
| Education | Brown University (BA, MFA) |
| Genre | Poetry, novels, essays |
| Notable awards | Fulbright Scholar Guggenheim Fellowship Believer Book Award MacArthur Fellowship |
Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979)[1] is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors.[2][3] Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.[4]
Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. His mother is the clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner.[5] 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.[6] At Brown University he studied with poet C. D. Wright and earned a B.A. in political theory and an MFA in poetry.[7]
Lerner was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of 52 sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures.[8] 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,[9] won the Believer Book Award[10] 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."[11] Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review.[12] Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggie Nelson called 10:04 a "near perfect piece of literature."[13] 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."[14] Giles Harvey, in The New York Times Magazine, called The Topeka School "the best book yet by the most talented writer of his generation." Lerner’s essays, art criticism, and literary criticism have appeared in Harper's, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, among other publications.[15] The Topeka School, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[16]
In 2023, Lerner published his fourth full-length book of poetry, both verse and prose poems, The Lights. In The New York Times, Srikanth Reddy wrote: "It takes a poet to invent characters who argue that 'the voice must be sung into existence.' It takes a novelist to honor so many perspectives, histories and intimacies in one book..The poet/novelist of The Lights enlarges Baudelaire’s experiments in prose poetry into a multistory dream house for contemporary American readers." In The New Yorker, Kamran Javadizadeh called The Lights as "world-bridging poetry", "uncannily beautiful", and "exceedingly lovely".
In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication.[17] In 2016 he became the first poetry editor at Harper's.[18] 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.[19]
In 2016 Lerner became a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.[20] He received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.[21]
In the December 2023 issue of Harper's Magazine, Lerner published a fictional story titled "The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory."[22] In the story, Lerner demonstrates a familiarity with Wikipedian editing and administrative processes, as well as problematic issues such as circular reporting, sockfarm creation, and sponsored content on Wikipedia. He explained: "I've written a short story—or a kind of fictional essay (it's based on a real project of mine but all the facts have been altered)—about a young man's efforts to manipulate Wikipedia for the good (so he thinks) through the construction of multiple online identities."
Reflections about Lerner's piece prompted a "Disinformation Report" reflection in the December 4, 2023, issue of The Signpost.[23]
