Ariana Reines is an American poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); Mercury (2011); and Thursday (2012). She has taught at UC Berkeley (Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry, 2009), Columbia University (2013), The New School (2013), and Tufts University (2014). Reines has been described by Michael Silberblatt of NPR's Bookworm as "one of the crucial voices of her generation." She describes the subject matter of her work as "bearing witness to the search for the sacred in the 21st century." Her play Telephone was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre, and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in February 2009, with two Obie wins. She participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as a member of Semiotext(e). Her performance collaboration with Jim Fletcher, Mortal Kombat, was presented at Le Mouvement in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, in August 2014, and was again presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2014. Biography Reines was born on October 24, 1982, in Salem, Massachusetts. She said that the Salem Witch Trials were relevant in her writing, saying "I am sure that Salem's history has influenced me in every way. I know that there still lurks in me the fear that if I speak the truth as I know it, I will be locked up in a mental institution and then killed in public while a mockery of me is made." In college, she studied English literature and French, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College. She completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. In 2010, she served as a translator on a UN Mission to Haiti. Works The Cow The Cow (Fence Books, 2006) addresses themes of abjection, filth, and disgust. It is framed by several excerpted texts, including a guide to bovine carcass disposal, as well as the Bible, and works by Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, and Marguerite Duras, a structure which Reines has described as "passing all of literature through a hamburger helper." Of the titular figure, Reines has claimed that "the cow is a real modernist figure. I feel like after God died, the cow became the onlooker in great works of modernism...it's like the residue of the divine in the twentieth century." Reines' writing style in