- Royce Fellowship
Concentration
Award Year
Ben will work with Paradigm Press to reissue "Debridement," a book of poetry by Professor Michael Harper, and to edit a companion publication of critical essays about the book. He also will be editorial assistant for NuMuse, a journal of plays from Brown University. Using this experience, Lerner plans to start a poetry press devoted to the production of work by Brown undergraduates.
A former Fulbright scholar in Spain, Lerner co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts. He received his M.F.A. from Brown’s Graduate Program in Literary Arts in 2003. Ben is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His sonnet sequence, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), won the Hayden Carruth Award, was chosen by Library Journal as one of the year’s 12 best poetry books, and was a Lannan Literary Selection. His poetry has also been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry, New Voices (2008), and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (2009). Ben co-founded, No: a journal of the arts, and he has also served as the poetry editor for Critical Quarterly. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts.