Eileen Myles. Photo: Shae Detar
The Publishing Triangle is proud to announce that Eileen Myles is the 2020 recipient of its Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. This prize, named in honor of the legendary book editor of the 1970s and 1980s, has been presented since 1989.
Eileen Myles is the author of twenty-one books, including, most recently, evolution, a collection of poems, and Afterglow / a dog memoir, which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction in 2018. Four of their other books have also been finalists for Publishing Triangle awards: Inferno and Cool for You in fiction, and Sorry, Tree and Skies in poetry. Eileen is an art journalist as well as a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer, and they have also written plays, libretti, and screenplays. Myles’s books have been translated into ten languages. They will publish For Now, a book-length essay on writing, later this year with Yale University Press.
Eileen has been the recipients of many honors and grants during their long and distinguished career, which began soon after they moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. These accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, and a recent grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Myles has also exhibited their photographs at the Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York, and they have written and directed The Trip, a seventeen-minute film currently on the festival circuit. Eileen divides their time between Marfa, Texas, and New York.
Myles will receive a prize of $3000 with this award. They will be presented with the prize at our Triangle Awards ceremony on April 30, 2020. The ceremony, held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium (63 Fifth Avenue, New York City), is free and open to the public; it starts at 7 p.m.