Rainer Diana Hamilton

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of four books: Lilacs (Krupskaya Books 2025), God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017), and Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012). Their next book, cowritten with Violet Spurlock, This Reasonable Habit is forthcoming in 2026 from Spunk. Hamilton’s critical and creative work has appeared in frieze, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, the Washington Post, BOMB, Prelude, and Lambda Literary, among other publications. They received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, with a dissertation—Style and the Experiment—that considered the persistence of something like a ‘single-author style’ even in works produced by collage, chance procedure, or other means of undermining it. Hamilton has taught first-year and creative writing at Cornell University, CUNY, the Bard Prison Initiative, and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. They were born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and they live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with a large cat named both Monster and Émile.