ABOUT

Elaine Sexton is a poet, critic, bookmaker, educator, and librettist. She is the author of the forthcoming opera, The Post Office, written in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, premiering in the spring (2026) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Spruce Peak Arts. This chamber opera in poems will also appear in book form with Grid Books (May, 2026). Her most recent collection of poetry is Site Specific: New & Selected Poems (Grid, 2025). Her four previous books of poetry are: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015), and Drive (Grid Books, 2022).

She is a 2026 NYSCA (New York State Council for the Arts) grantee for her work on the opera, as well as a 2025 Mellon Foundation funded Opera Fusion: New Works residency, and a 2023 Hermitage Artist Retreat residency.

Her poems, art reviews, book reviews, and works in visual art have appeared in journals and anthologies, textbooks and websites including American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, Ploughshares, O! the Oprah Magazine, the 50th Anniversary issues of Provincetown Arts, and Poetry Daily.

Her recent iPhone pics have been included in the Carriage Trade gallery’s annual Social Photography exhibition, NYC, (2019-2025). An avid book maker and micro-publisher, she is the author of numerous chapbooks, and has curated site-specific events with accompanying limited-edition chapbooks, and periodicals, among them Hair and 2 Horatio.

She teaches text and image and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has been guest faculty at New York University and in the graduate writing program at City College (CUNY). She is regularly invited to teach poetry, bookmaking, and art writing at arts and writing programs and centers in the U.S. and abroad, among them Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Arts Workshop International (Assisi). She teaches private workshops in her studio and online. Formerly, she served as a senior editor at ARTnews and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly.