Mutants & Hybrids: Mixing Genres with Eleni Sikelianos

Our earliest writers combined forms naturally: Herodotus wrote stories about what he saw or heard and called it history; Sappho wrote songs we call poetry. In this talk, Eleni Sikelianos, poet and memoirist, whose newest book is the mixed-genre You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek), discusses how she and other writers are reviving the flow of genetic material between forms to reflect our complicated minds and lives.

Eleni Sikelianos‘s most recent book is You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek). Published this year by Coffee House Press, it is a hybrid memoir that incorporates poetry, photography, prose, and biography. She is also the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (2013), Body Clock (2008), and The California Poem (2004), as well as the multimedia text, The Book of Jon (2004). Winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series, she is also the recipient of two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Fullbright Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Denver and Naropa.

Part of Other Impulses: Poets Writing Across Genres