About

BENJAMIN ALESHIRE grew up in rural Vermont, and spent most of the past decade based in New Orleans. His poetry and essays have been published in The Times of London, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Lit Hub, and many others. He makes his living as a poet for hire in the French Quarter, writing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter, and touring widely. In March 2020 he will be a James Merrill Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, and he has also received awards and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the VT Arts Council, the BCA Center, the Frost Place, the University of New Orleans, Studio in the Woods, and New York University. 

 

To book Ben for private events, festivals, etc, contact his events agent Lisa Giordano here. Previous clients include Princeton University, the House of Yes, Bernie Sanders, The Bellagio Las Vegas, Shakespeare & Co in Paris, the Troubadour London, Sir Tom Stoppard, and Jimmy Page.

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An excerpt of his novel-in-progress, POET FOR HIRE, was published at Lit Hub. The first chapter was selected by Nathaniel Rich as the winner of the 2019 Words & Music Prize, and the full manuscript was chosen by Andrei Codrescu as runner-up for the 2019 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize. He is currently seeking representation. 

 

Ben's broadsides and books are archived in the Special Collections of Yale University, the University of Vermont, and St. Lawrence University. He was awarded a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council, as well as the Chighizola Poetry Prize from the University of New Orleans. Ben serves as a contributing editor for the Green Mountains Review. 

 

His work as a poet and musician has been featured in El Mundo, (Spain,) NEON Magazin (Germany), The Havana Times (Cuba), La Repubblica (Italy), NPR Boston, SPIN, and USA Today. In 2018, The Times of London broke with 233 years of their editorial history to invite Aleshire to contribute a poem for the first time as a leading article. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Boston Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, Adroit, Meridian, DIAGRAM, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry East, Rattle, Cortland Review, London Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, and many others.