Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning 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. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." 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. Myles uses they/them pronouns. Life and career Early life and education Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1949, to a family with a working-class background. They attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass Boston in 1971. Myles moved to New York City in 1974 with the intention of becoming a poet. In New York they participated in writing workshops held at St. Mark's Poetry Project, which promoted the idea of the "working artist." There they studied with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky, and were given a template for creating art in the context of community. There, Myles first met the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom they admired and who became the subject of several of their poems and essays. In 1979 they worked as an assistant to the poet James Schuyler. Artistic director of St. Mark's In 1984 Myles was hired as the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and held that position until 1986. They have stated their time there gave them the opportunity to rethink the institution that influenced their early work. During Reagan's presidency, 1981–1988, Myles dealt with the cuts to the NEA art budget and focused their energies on broadening the aesthetic and cultural range of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Myles' leadership of the Project represented a generational shift away from the church's base, which until then been run by the second generation members of the New York School. Program Coordinators in this period were Patricia Spears Jones, and Jessica Hagedorn, and Myles invited Alice Notley and Dennis Cooper to teach. Charles Bernstein ran the lecture series, Chris Kraus, Marc Nasdor, and Richard Elovich coordinated performance, Tim Dlugos and James Ruggia edited the Newsletter. During their tenure at St. Mark's, Myles performed their now well-known poem "An American Poem" for the first