Memory Rehearsal presentation by Eleni Sikelianos, Poet and Author

In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based on intentional reimaginings of Sappho’s work and life. A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of these illustrious ancestors, her great grandparents, who, in the early 20th century staged a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. It was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In her new book, Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her search for these pioneering ancestors, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.

Eleni will read from and discuss Memory Rehearsal, which Kirkus calls a “moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology.”

Speaker Bio: Eleni Sikelianos was born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers. She is a poet, writer, collaborator, and “master of mixing genres.” As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and a trilogy of unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine, and, most recently, Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026). Memory Rehearsal, called “a triumph of cultural archaeology” in a starred Kirkus review and named One of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books for 2026, is a genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.

Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence.

Hosted By: Center for Hellenic Studies