Mercury

Ariana Reines returns with more of her elegant, blisteringly direct attention to culture, lovers, and the deep image.

Ariana Reines was born in Salem, Massachuestts. She studied French and English at Barnard College, graduating Summa Cum Laude, with many scholarships and prizes, including awards for writing, translation, and the study of Chaucer. She worked in restaurants, dungeons, bars, galleries, and street fairs, and was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and at The European Graduate School, studying literature, performance, and philosophy with Sylvère Lotringer, Antoine Compagnon, Claire Denis, Giorgio Agamben, and many others. (ABD)

Her books include The Cow (Alberta Prize: Fence 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar: 2010; Fence (Audio): 2011), and the forthcoming Mercury (Fence: 2011). She has given readings across the United States and in France, poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (Dworkin + Goldsmith, eds) and Gurlesque (Glenum + Greenberg, eds), and her books have been reviewed, and other writings featured, on KCRW's Bookworm, the UK's The DotPod, and in The Fader, Flaunt, the Boston Review, RainTaxi, Soft Targets, LIT, BOMBlog, WebConjunctions, HTML GIant, and in many other places.

Telephone, her first play, was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and produced in February 2009 at The Cherry Lane, with Obie wins for the production's director and leading actress. Inspired by Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book and the structure of James Joyce's "Exiles", the production received glowing reviews from Ben Brantley in The New York Times, as well as in international papers like The Guardian and Financial Times; it was cited in the New Yorker and The Village Voice as one of 2009's favorite plays. A re-imagining of Telephone's second act was featured alongside other writing by Ariana in the Works+Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in Fall 2009. Telephone was published in PLAY: A JOURNAL OF PLAYS in 2010.

In 2009, she was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at UC Berkeley, the youngest person ever to hold that position. She has also taught at Columbia University, and The European Graduate School, with visits and master classes at Pomona College, UC Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Ariana also translates from the French. Volumes of translation include The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig (Semiotext(e): 2009), My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire (Mal-O-Mar: 2009), and the forthcoming Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the YoungGirl (Working Title) by the TIQQUN collective (Semiotext(e): 2012), as well as shorter works by Alain Badiou, Pierre Guyotat, and Tony Duvert.

In Spring 2010 she traveled to Haiti twice, working in the Port-au-Prince area with children through The Association for Trauma Outreach and Prevention, and later in medical and supply logistics, with Materials Management Relief Corps. A Vodou initiate, she is now exploring the relation between Vodou ritual and Greek tragedy, among other things.