Richard Siken

Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker best known for his 2005 collection Crush, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize as selected by Louise Glück and was later a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. His poems are marked by long, breathless lines, obsessive repetition, and a voice caught between desire and violence, often addressing queer love with an intensity that blurs the line between confession and myth.

Beyond Crush, Siken published War of the Foxes in 2015 through Copper Canyon Press, expanding his range toward questions of painting, representation, and language itself while retaining the propulsive, incantatory style that made his debut so distinctive. He has received a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Siken works as an editor at Spork Press and, notably, holds a full-time job as a social worker, a fact that grounds his reputation as a poet writing from lived experience rather than academic distance. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and his poems have found an unusually devoted following online, where lines from Crush circulate widely as some of the most quoted contemporary American poetry.