As part of the Kimon Friar lecture series, the American College of Greece and the Educational Foundation ” Attiki Tradition ” invite you to the lecture on

 Translating Flesh, Translating Stone: Search of an Origin Story, with Eva and AngelosSikelianos

and speaker EleniSikelianos, poet, Professor of Literature, Brown University, USA.

EleniSikelianos will be introduced by the poet, writer and professor of history HarisVlavianos.

Thursday 9 June 2022, at 19:00

Events Hall of the American College of Greece

(6 Gravia, AgiaParaskevi)

The event, which will be held in English, is open to the public

and will be broadcast via live-streaming. A reception will follow.

More information here.

The new book by EleniSikelianos

You, the beastly machine

will be released in a few days by Pataki Publications.

A few words about the book

The story of the Golden Greek, EleniPapamarkou, who married five times, had three children, was a burlesque dancer under the pseudonym Melena, the Leopard Girl, but also “the toughest woman who ate iron and chewed steel on the face of the earth”.

Drawing on history and memory, Sikelianos writes about her grandmother, a link in a larger family chain that encompasses morphomaniacs and heroin addicts, refugees, rebels, and aristocrats from the Ionian Sea, one of the richest families in the United States who exhausted their fortune attempting to revive ancient Greek theatre, Lithuanian Jews, musicians, waitresses, a painter, several poets (one Nobel Prize nominee), opium traffickers and a dwarf (one of Helen’s five husbands).

Meandering between the real and the imaginary, combining chronicle with poetry, document and essay with fictional invention, Sikelianos masterfully poses the question of identity as it emerges through the experience of a woman of Greek descent, a second-generation immigrant to America.

 A few words about the author

Eleni Sikelianos, great-granddaughter of Angelos Sikelianos and Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, was born in 1965 in Santa Barbara, California. An award-winning poet whose work has been translated into 12 languages, she is the author of, among other collections, Earliest Worlds, The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (National Poetry Series award), The California Poem, and The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, a 2013 best book according to Library Journal. Among other things, he wrote the “hybrid memoir” The Book of John (Pataki Publications 2014, ed. Katerina Schina), best book of the year by Barnes & Noble Booksellers. He teaches creative writing at Brown University. She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband, novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace.