Eleanor Lerman (born 1952 Bronx) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
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She grew up in the Bronx and Far Rockaway; she is a lifelong New Yorker.[1]
In 1973 her first book of poetry, Armed Love, was nominated for a National Book Award. Much attention came to this new and lauded poet. In one of the more controversial reviews of her work, the New York Times described her first book as "XX rated" for its frank discussion of sexuality and gender. Although Lerman published a second book in 1975, she stopped publishing poetry in response to the backlash against her work.
She published her third book of poetry twenty-five years later in 2001 when Sarabande Books commissioned The Mystery of Meteors. Sarabande also published her fourth book of poetry, Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2006, given by the American Academy of Poets and The Nation magazine. In awarding the prize, Tony Hoagland cited Lerman's "vernacular resilience."
For one of her recent books, The Blonde on the Train, the author has experimented with creating a web site devoted specifically to the book and its contents, including excerpts: http://www.blondeonthetrain.com
She has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, [2] and in 2006 her fiction collection "Observers and Other Stories" was published by the Lesbian press Artemis Press.
Lerman is also the recipient of the inaugural Juniper Prize, the 2002 Joy Bale Boone Award for Poetry, the 2006 Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, and a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2007, she received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.[3] In 2011, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[4]
She lives on Long Island, in Nassau County.