Background
Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry.
essayist university professor writer poet
Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry.
Brown University.
Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. 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. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year"s twelve best books of poetry.
He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006.
Lerner"s third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010. and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction and the New York Public Library"s Young Lions prize. In 2008, Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British scholarly publication.
He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program at Brooklyn College. Lerner received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.
Lerner"s mother is the psychologist Harriet Lerner.
At Brown University he earned a Bachelor of Arts in political theory and an Master of Fine Arts in poetry. His essays, art criticism, and literary criticism have appeared in Art in America, boundary 2, Frieze, Harper"s Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.