photo: Alex Kolodkin

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1951. She is the author of The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004); Song (1995), which was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and To The Place of Trumpets (1987), which was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review, and her work was chosen for the 1993 and 1994 volumes of The Best American Poetry. Her many honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the Illinois State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Brigit Pegeen Kelly is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.