Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

"[3] They won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 2011 for their Inferno (a poet's novel)[4] In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow (a memoir), which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life.

"[11] There they studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky,[8] and were given a template for creating art in the context of community.

[citation needed] During Reagan's presidency, 1981–1989, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget[15] and focused their energies on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project.

[16] Program Coordinators in this period were Patricia Spears Jones, and Jessica Hagedorn, and Myles invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach.

[11] At the beginning of the 1991–1992 presidential election, Myles heard George H. W. Bush speak about the threat to freedom of speech posed by the dialog of activists and minoritized people.

"[17] Myles then conducted an "openly female" write-in campaign for the office of President of the United States[18][19][17] from the East Village that spiraled into a project of national interest.

[2] UCSD funded the research and travel grant that enabled the creation of Inferno (2010), as well as Hell, an opera composed by Michael Webster, for which Myles wrote the libretto.

[28] In 1977 and 1979, Myles published issues of dodgems, a literary magazine, a title referring, in the vernacular of Great Britain, to bumper cars,[29] specifically those of Revere Beach, MA.

The dodgems issues featured poems by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, as well as a letter from Lily Tomlin and an angry note from a neighbor; both issues are referenced in the book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side—Adventures in Writing: 1960–1980, (which also describes St. Mark's),[27] and were exhibited in vitrines in the Library's 1998 show on the same subject.

"[34] The book is framed by a transcript of a panel at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts featuring Helen Miranda Wilson, Frances Richard, John Kelly, Molly Benjamin, and Jack Pierson, who each spoke about their own relation to the sky.

[36] As Ian Bodkin writes, Myles' poems "navigat[e] the ever-insular landscape of our technological culture that invades moments of quiet thought" in Snowflake, then "offers a sense of return to the people and places of intimacy, connections that bring her back to this world" in different streets.

[citation needed] Myles's first book, The Irony of the Leash (1978), was produced on the mimeograph machine at St. Mark's Poetry Project.

[citation needed] Myles' early book and theater reviews appeared in New York Native, Outweek, and Out, and they were a notable figure on the poetry and queer art scene of the 1980s and 1990s on the Lower East Side.

In 2006 Myles received an Warhol/Creative Capital grant, which funded their first collection of nonfiction, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009).

[44][45] In a review in The Los Angeles Times, Erika Taylor wrote: "Myles' collection of short stories is so unabashedly solipsistic, so confident in its own self-absorption, that she takes chances and has payoffs few other writers would be willing to risk.

"[46] Myles's second full-length work, Cool for You: a nonfiction novel (2000), catalogs abject institutional spaces of an "insider", in opposition to the male artist as an "outsider".

[49] Charles Shipman, in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote: "Although the writing is sometimes too fragmented to follow and occasionally becomes a tad melodramatic (oh, those awful nuns!

Myles's later plays, Feeling Blue parts 1, 2, and 3, Modern Art, and Our Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, written for Alina Troyano, were all produced at WOW Cafe and P.S.