Santa Barbara Scholarship Foundation Award Eleni Sikelianos grew up in California, and was the first person in her immediate family to attend college. She wanted to be a writer from the age of nine, and read anything she could get her hands on. At 19, Eleni left the U.S. and traveled to England, Greece and Turkey. A dinner with a group of Sudanese expatriates in Istanbul led her to Khartoum and eight months of buses, boats, and hitchhiking through Africa-from Cairo to Nairobi. After over a year of travels, she settled in Paris for a time.
Writing provides the structure around which everything else orbits.
Her exploration sometimes includes slipping into other genres and collaborating with artists who work in diverse media. Since then, Eleni has taught poetry in the men's and women's prisons in Colorado, in the homeless communities of the Tenderloin and SoMa in San Francisco, in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa, at the San Francisco Art Institute, in libraries, and in many, many public schools. She has just returned from a six-month writing project in Greece, where she was working on a family history. Current writing projects include that, and a long poem about growing up in California. For the past five years, she has been tackling Proust's A la recherche de temps perdu in French.