Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

Life and work

Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. His mother is the clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner. He is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School, where he participated in debate and forensics, winning the 1997 National Forensic League National Tournament in International Extemporaneous Speaking. At Brown University he studied with poet C. D. Wright and earned a B.A. in political theory and an MFA in poetry. Lerner was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of 52 sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004 Library Journal named it one of the year's 12 best books of poetry. In 2003 Lerner traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain, where he wrote his second book of poetry, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006. It was named a finalist for the National Book Award. His third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010. Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, published in 2011, won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction (The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction) and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. Writing in The Guardian, Geoff Dyer called it "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future." Excerpts of Lerner's second novel, 10:04, won the Terry Southern Prize from The Paris Review. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maggie Nelson called 10:04 a "near perfect piece of literature." The New York Times Book Review called Lerner's 2019 novel The Topeka School "a high-water mark in recent American fiction." Giles Harvey, in The New York Times Magazine, called it "the best book yet by the most talented writer of his generation." The New York Times also named it one of the ten best books of the year. Lerner's essays, art criticism, and literary criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications. The Topeka School, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2023, Lerner published his fourth full-length book of poetry, both verse and prose poems, The Lights. In The New York Times, Srikanth Reddy wrote: "It takes a poet to invent characters who argue that 'the voice must be sung into existence.' It takes a novelist to honor so many perspectives, histories and intimacies in one book..The poet/novelist of The Lights enlarges Baudelaire’s experiments in prose poetry into a multistory dream house for contemporary American readers." In The New Yorker, Kamran Javadizadeh called The Lights "world-bridging poetry", "uncannily beautiful", and "exceedingly lovely". In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication. In 2016 he became the first poetry editor at Harper's. He has taught at California College of the Arts and the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College. He was an original signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions", which endorses a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals.

Poetry

Novels

Non-fiction

Edited volumes

Collaborations with artists

Awards