Eleni Stecopoulos and Miranda Mellis at City Lights

Eleni Stecopoulos in conversation with Miranda Mellis at City Lights to celebrate the publication of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing by Eleni Stecopoulos, published by Nightboat Books.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic. A new book of essays, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, is out from Nightboat this fall. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves”; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called “riveting . . . rare beauties.” Stecopoulos’s writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, [φρμκ], Best American Experimental Writing, Open Space (SFMOMA), In Insomnia: An Anthology, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, ecopoetics, Viz. Inter-Arts, Second Stutter, The Capilano Review, Harvard Review, and many other venues. She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor and mentor. She lives in Northern California.

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications, The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist. Her fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in various publications including The Believer’s The Logger, Harper’s, Conjunctions, the New York Times, Fenceand elsewhere. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony. She co-founded and co-edited The Encyclopedia Project and once played in a band called My Invisible. She teaches at Evergreen State College. She has taught in the MFA programs at California College of the Arts, Mills College, and University of San Francisco and has taught undergraduates at University of Chicago, University of California at Santa Cruz, and Brown University. Forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2025 will be her new book Crocosmia.