Richard Siken

Richard Siken (born 1967) is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first poetry collection, Crush, was selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and went on to win a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

His later books include War of the Foxes (2015) and I Do Know Some Things (2025). For I Do Know Some Things, Siken was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Life and career Siken was born in New York City in 1967 and moved to Tucson, Arizona, when he was two years old. He received a BA in psychology from the University of Arizona before entering its graduate creative writing program, where he later earned an MFA in poetry.

Before publishing his first book, Siken worked as a social worker for developmentally disabled adults; during his graduate-student years, he also worked with patients navigating serious mental illness.

Siken wrote and revised Crush over a period of 15 years. Siken has said that the death of his boyfriend in 1990 shaped the book. Alongside the book's prizes, Siken has received a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, two Lannan residencies, and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His second collection, War of the Foxes, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015, a decade after Crush. The collection was described as a "painterly" and more fabular follow-up to Crush. A 2025 Poetry Foundation profile also reproduced paintings from his 2015 series Ten Men in Seven Suits. His first poem published afterward, "Real Estate", appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day in December 2020. His third collection, I Do Know Some Things, was published in 2025.

Style and reception In a 2015 Poetry Foundation interview, Crush was described as a rare success for a contemporary poetry collection, having received both critical and popular acclaim and sold more than 20,000 copies.

In a 2025 essay for The Yale Review, Richie Hofmann wrote that Crush had a strong influence on younger poets and later found an online afterlife, with lines from the book reused in memes, fan fiction, and other internet artifacts.

Reviewers of War of the Foxes emphasized its visual qualities. The Academy of American Poets described the book as a "much-anticipated" follow-up whose fables, still lifes, and landscapes marked a shift from the emotional urgency of Crush while retaining Siken's concern with romantic and familial desolation.

Works Poetry collections Crush (Yale University Press, 2005) War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025)