Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator from Salem, Massachusetts. Her books include A Sand Book (2019), winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize; longlisted for the National Book Award, The Cow (Alberta Prize, 2006), Coeur de Lion (2007), and Mercury (2011), and a chapbook The Origin of the World (2014) created for Semiotext(e)’s contribution to the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her play Telephone (2009) was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre, winning two Obies, and has been performed in Norwegian translation (2017) and at KW Berlin (2018) among others. Current commissions include Possession (2023), a major sculpture and performance collaboration with Liz Magic Laser, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, and Divine Justice (2022), a 24-hour theatrical environment based on Euripedes’ Medea at Performance Space New York.
Reines is the translator of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (Mal-O-Mar, 2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (Semiotext(e) 2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young Girl (Semiotext(e) 2012). She has previously taught at Columbia University, the European Graduate School, NYU, Tufts, Naropa, The New School, Yale and many others. In 2009 she was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley and in 2022 is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Wichita State University, and the Mary Routt Endowed Chair in Writing at Scripps College.
In 2012 she created Ancient Evenings, an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, as well as Lazy Eye Haver, an astrology practice through which she practices new forms of arts and consciousness pedagogy. In March 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, she created Invisible College, a hub for poetry, art, and sacred study online.
Reading(s) will be streamed via the Creative Writing Program's YouTube Channel.