He claims to be engaged in ‘research.’ But since he lies, it’s not clear what this could mean. He also has a young person’s discernment about what is important, which is to say none at all. He is an intellectual fantasist somewhat autistic when it comes to poetry and somewhat narcissistic about everything else.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.Īn American language-student is in Madrid on somebody else’s dime, living in a paradise of lethargy, artsy natives, and drugs. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College. In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. It 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. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011.

Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the '25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)'. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the 'Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie' in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.īorn and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic.

Atocha station novel