Benjamin Lerner

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

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 twelve best books of poetry.

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. It was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Lerner's 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. Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review.

His 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 many other publications.

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, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.