About Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner, born February 4, 1979 in Topeka, Kansas, is an American poet and writer. Son of renowned psychologists who worked in the Karl Menninger psychiatric clinic, a graduate of Brown University, Ben Lerner has won several major poetry prizes. He now lives in Brooklyn. He teaches literature at Brooklyn College. In 2015 he received the prestigious Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. 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.
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.
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