Brigit Pegeen Kelly, a professor in the Department of English, has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets for a career of distinguished poetic achievement.
She is the 2008 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which in the past has gone to poets such as E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. Awarded regularly since 1946, the honor is given to one poet each year. It comes with a $25,000 stipend.
Born in Palo Alto, Calif., Kelly has published several books, including To The Place of Trumpets (1987), Song (1995), The Orchard (2004), and Poems: Song and the Orchard (2008). Her work has also appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology.
“Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States,” says poet Stephen Dobyns, according to the Academy. “In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet.”
Adds Academy Chancellor Carl Phillips: “Brigit Kelly has shaped a poetry and vision that demand to be taken on their own terms—which is to say, there’s an originality that is everywhere unmistakeable. Her sentences shuttle steadily back and forth to produce a tapestry-like meditation that throws into arresting—often disturbing—relief a world that lies ‘beyond the report of beauty,’ where cruelty and sweetness are easily, perhaps necessarily, confusable for one another, a world whose topography is at once mythic, recognizable, and utterly Kelly’s own.”
Kelly is no stranger to recognition for her writing. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Orchard, and she has also received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, and a Whiting Writers Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Illinois State Council on the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Kelly and Louise Glück, a recipient of the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award, will be participating in the Poets Forum (November 6-8 in New York City) where they will read from their work at the Poets Awards Ceremony.
The Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization founded in 1934. It has connected people to poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the Poetry Audio Archive, American Poet, its journal, and hundreds of prizes for poets of all ages. It also runs a website, Poets.org.
