Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney is the author of nine books, including the poetry collections Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books, 2025); Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022); Sho (Wave Books, 2021), a 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award, National Book Award, and Minnesota Book Award finalist; and Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), a Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize winner, a Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Firecracker awardee, and California Book Award silver medalist. Kearney is also the author of Someone Took They Tongues (Subito Press, 2016), and Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), which Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.”

In 2023, Kearney received the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.