Ben Lerner reading on Apr. 12

Ben Lerner, a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, is reading on Tuesday, April 12 at 7 p.m. in the Porter Byrum Welcome Center at Wake Forest University.

Lerner is a novelist, poet, and critic. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011), won The Believer Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, among others. His second novel, 10:04 (Faber/FSG), was an international bestseller, won The Paris Review’s 2012 Terry Southern Prize, was a finalist for the 2014 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Folio Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by more than a dozen major publications. Lerner is also the author of three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, a Fullbright Scholar in Spain, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for the German translation of The Lichtenberg Figures. His monograph, The Hatred of Poetry, will be published this summer. His essays can be found in publications such as Art in America, Frieze, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A from Brown University and is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.