Eileen Myles

This activity is centred on Eileen Myles, one of the most unique voices in poetry and an international figure of LGBTQI+ literature, in an encounter which takes the form of a lecture and recital and also features the participation of journalist Nerea Pérez de las Heras and her reading of the manifesto I Want a President (1992), by artist Zoe Leonard.

In their direct and confessional writing, Myles explores themes of gender, sexuality and body, their style characterised by first-person prose replete with humour and social critique, where personal life and political activism intertwine to form a key voice in the visibility of LGTBQI+ rights. Their best-known works most notably include Chelsea Girls (1994, translated into Spanish by Las Afueras, 2024), an autobiographical novel which narrates Myles’s youth in New York’s underground scene and sketches the construction of a personality that refuses to be typecast or yield to any conventions; I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (2016), a compilation of forty years of confessional poetry, and Pathetic Literature (2022), an anthology published by Myles which brings together work by different writers around the idea of the pathetic.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Myles was an active participant in New York’s culture scene — along with such icons as Patti Smith, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker and Robert Mapplethorpe — and in 1992 they ran for president of the United States as part of a satirical campaign denouncing the exclusion in the electoral system of those who did not respond to the male pattern of power. This stance, straddling performance and institutional critique, bolstered their status as a counterculture figure and prompted the artist Zoe Leonard to write I Want a President, a poem which has become a manifesto on difference.

Participants

Eileen Myles (Cambridge, 1949) is a poet and novelist. They have published almost twenty volumes of poetry and prose, most notably Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991); Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Press, 1994); Cool for You (Soft Skull, 2000); Skies (Black Sparrow Press, 2001); Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007); The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Semiotext(e), 2009); Inferno: A Poet's Novel (OR Books, 2010); I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (HarperCollins, 2016); Afterglow: A Dog Memoir (Grove Press, 2017); and Evolution (Grove Press, 2018). They have also directed The Poetry Project, a key centre of experimental poetry in New York, and have been honoured with a Guggenheim fellowship, a Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, four Lambda Literary Awards and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, among others.

Nerea Pérez de las Heras (Madrid, 1982) is a journalist and communicator. She is behind the project Feminismo para torpes (2016–2019), which takes the form of a book, a theatre monologue and a series of videos. She also directs and presents the podcasts Saldremos mejores (Podium Podcast), with Inés Hernand, and Lo normal (Cadena Ser), with Antonio Nuño, and has been honoured with the Reconocimiento Arcoíris, awarded by Spain’s Ministry of Equality, for her activism in enhancing the visibility of lesbian and trans-inclusive feminism.