Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her other books include Tiffany’s Poems (Song Cave, 2015), Ramayana (Song Cave, 2015), The Origin of the World (Semiotext(e), 2014), Beyond Relief (Belladonna*, 2013), Thursday (Spork Press, 2012), Mercury (Fence Books, 2011), Coeur de Lion (Fence Books, 2007), and The Cow (Fence Books, 2006). Her poems have been anthologized in Corrected Slogans (Triple Canopy, 2013), Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Materials (Triple Canopy, 2011), Against Expression (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. In 2020, she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She’s been a MacDowell Fellow, has judged the National Poetry Series, and writes regularly for ArtForum.

Reines’s first play Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards. A re-imagining of its second act was featured as part of the Guggenheim’s Works+Process series in 2009, and the script was published in Play: A Journal of Plays in 2010. Telephone was published by Wonder in 2018. Reines’s translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012).

Performances Reines has created include Miss St’s Hieroglyphic Suffering for the Guggenheim (2009); The Origin of the World for Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (2012); Mortal Kombat for Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne, Galerie TPW Toronto, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2014), & more. Public Space, a 2017 sculpture collaboration with Oscar Tuazon, was shown at Stuart Shave/Modern Art London.

In an interview with The White Review, Reines as asked about the connection between writing the occult and writing female desire:
Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing what’s invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a woman. Since the beginning of my career I’ve been haunted by the old mode of writing, which I think of as ‘righting’ – seeking redemption, somehow, by rendering past events into art; into fiction, into vision, into some form of intellectual lucidity that could somehow free me from the shit of the real. This is how the old dudes used to do it, and it’s not without its value. But what fascinates me is writing’s relationship to the future. Every book I’ve written has radically transformed my life. It has materially altered my lifestyle, brought me into contact with new friends and lovers, artworks and countries, ideas and vibrations I had neither the guts nor the imagination to visualize in advance.

Reines has taught at Columbia University, NYU, The New School, and Tufts, and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. She has also been Visiting Critic in the Department of Sculpture at Yale In 2009 she was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. Since 2012, she has worked privately with clients through her astrology practice, Lazy Eye Haver.