Ben Lerner


Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow, among other honors. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

Life and work

Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. 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. At Brown University he studied with poet C. D. Wright and earned a B.A. in political theory and an MFA in poetry.
Lerner was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of 52 sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures.
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, won the Believer Book Award 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." Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, , won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggie Nelson called 10:04 a "near perfect piece of literature." 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." 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 Art in America, boundary 2, Frieze, Harper's, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications. The Topeka School was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication. In 2016 he became the first poetry editor at Harper's. 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.
In 2016 Lerner became a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.
Lerner's mother is the psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Poetry

;Stories
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collectedNotes
Ross Perot and China2019included in The Topeka School

Non-fiction

The Hatred of Poetry. FSG Originals, 2016.

Collaborations with artists