Photo © Dina Scoppettone

Stephen Kessler

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Stephen Kessler received a B.A. in Languages and Literature from Bard College and and an M.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

His collections of poetry include The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010) and Burning Daylight (Littoral Press, 2007) among others. His translations of the poet Luis Cernuda have received numerous awards including a Lambda Literary Award for Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda (City Lights, 2004) and the Harold Morton Landon Award for translation from the Academy of American Poets for Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009).

Kessler's other books of translation include The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin, 2010), Eyeseas by Raymond Queneau (2008), which he translated with Daniela Hurezanu, Aphorisms (2002) by César Vallejo, Ode to Typography (1998) by Pablo Neruda, Save Twilight: Selected Poems of Julio Cortázar (1997), and From Beirut (1992) by Mahmoud Darwish, among others.

He was a founding editor and publisher of Alcatraz, an international journal, and The Sun, a Santa Cruz weekly newspaper, among other independent publishing ventures. Currently, he lives in Northern California where he is the editor of the quarterly literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review.