Eleanor Rand Wilner (born 1937) is an American poet and editor.

Life

Wilner obtained her bachelor's from Goucher College and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.^[1] Her graduate dissertation concerned the topic of imagination and was later published as Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (1975).^[2]

She was editor of The American Poetry Review and she is Advisory Editor of Calyx.^[3] She has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Smith College. She is on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College,^[4] and lives in Philadelphia.

In 2019, she won the Robert Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America's award for a "distinguished lifetime service to American poetry."

She has been active in civil rights and peace movements.

Awards

• Robert Frost Medal (2019)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1991)
• National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
• Juniper Prize
• Pushcart Prizes (awarded twice)

Works

• Shekhinah (poems), University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1984. ISBN 978-0-226-90025-4
• Sarah's Choice (poems). University of Chicago Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0-226-90028-5.
• Otherwise (poems). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-226-90029-2.
• Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 1998. ISBN 978-1-55659-082-5.
• The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)^[5] ISBN 978-1-55659-203-4
• Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010) ISBN 978-0-226-90032-2

Anthologies

• Jorie Graham; David Lehman, eds. (1990). Best American Poetry. Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-19187-4.
• Margaret Ferguson; Mary Jo Salter; Jon Stallworthy, eds. (August 1996). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-96820-0.
• Hilda Raz, ed. (2001). "Facing Into It". Best of Prairie schooner: fiction and poetry. University of Nebraska Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-0-8032-8972-7. Eleanor Wilner.
• Bill Henderson, ed. (1996). The 1997 Pushcart prize XXI: best of the small presses. Pushcart Press. ISBN 978-0-916366-96-4.
• Bill Henderson, ed. (2003). The Pushcart Prize Xxviii 2004: Best of the Small Presses. Pushcart Press. ISBN 978-1-888889-37-6.
• Melissa Tuckey, ed. (2018). Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820353159.

Translations

• David R. Slavitt; Smith Palmer Bovie, eds. (1998). "Medea". Euripides: Medea. Hecuba. Andromache. The Bacchae. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-8122-1626-4. Eleanor Wilner.

Non-fiction

• "Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance?", Poetry Foundation, 3.2.06
• Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1975.

Awards

• Robert Frost Medal (2019)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1991)
• National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
• Juniper Prize
• Pushcart Prizes (awarded twice)