Keetje Kuipers

Award-winning Poet
Essayist, Story Writer, Editor

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Love Poems to What’s Possible
  • Writing into the Multitudes: Intersectional Identities
  • The Poetics of Queer Kinship
  • Oh Let Me Please: Writing the Best Sex (Poems) of Your Life
  • DEI from the Inside Out: Restructuring the Heart of Your Organization
  • How to Build Your Book of Poems (and Not Anyone Else’s)
  • The Role of the Poet-Critic Today
  • The Editor’s Inside Perspective
  • Investigating Place: Writing through Re-Wilding
  • Homespun: Navigating Family Connections in Poetry
  • Down at Worm Level: The Poetics of Humility

Biography

“Keetje Kuipers’ poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.” —Tracy K. Smith

“Her vision is original, and her voice—precise, questioning, sensual, wry—is one I’d follow anywhere.” —Beth Ann Fennelly

“Kuipers’ voice haunts, indelible with mourning, grace, and an elegant wisdom.” —Dorianne Laux

“Kuipers’s narratives immerse us in the off-kilter, often surprising idiosyncrasies and contradictions of America, particularly in the places we go to see ourselves and our own country reflected.” —Kenyon Review

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, as well as Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Northwest, one of the oldest and most well-respected literary journals west of the Mississippi. Her most recent book, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2025, and is the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Lonely Women delves into the responsibilities we have to one another as relational beings, and the public and private performances of sexuality. Marilyn Hacker calls the collection “elegant, earthy, pertinent,” and poems from Lonely Women have already appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Yale Review, and as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. At times tender, at others gutting, Lonely Women resists definition – these are not simply queer poems, or forgiveness poems, or poems of sexual trauma – but at the same time, they delve brilliantly into those realms. Donika Kelly notes that the speaker of Lonely Women is “caught in the nexus of hunger and ruin, [exploring] the atmosphere between what she knows or almost knows and what cannot be explained. Recognition of the self, of others, Kuipers shows us, is a practice.”

Keetje’s previous three books of poetry, also published by BOA Editions, have been recognized for their voice and vision. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers. It combines frank sensuality with sincere emotion, yielding poems that travel from New York City to the American West on an exploration of love and loss. Dorianne Laux notes that Kuipers’ “voice haunts, indelible with mourning, grace, and an elegant wisdom.” Her second book, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club selection for The Rumpus, and calls us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, and even our own voracious desires. Her third collection, All Its Charms (2019), is a book of transformation and queer familial reinvention, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Washington State Book Award. Poems from the collection were honored with publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.

In addition to her own writing, a concentration on DEI work is a defining element of Keetje’s service within the literary community. As Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Northwest since 2020, Keetje founded the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the first fee-free contest of its kind. Each year the prize recognizes two first place winners with a $1,000 cash prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to read with the contest’s judge at Poet’s House in New York City. From 2021-2024, she served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, finishing out her term as both VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and VP of Awards. Currently, Keetje enjoys serving on the advisory board of the dual-language writers’ conference, Under the Volcano, located in Tepoztlán, Mexico, where she teaches the poetry manuscript workshop each January. She also co-curates, along with Cate Lycurgus, the Headwaters Reading Series in Missoula, MT, which is focused on using poetry to build knowledge and trust around vital issues of health, including Native health, women’s and LGBTQ+ health, mental health, and (dis)ability.

Keetje has taught at universities across the country, most recently as Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at Auburn University, where she was also Editor of Southern Humanities Review. While there, she founded the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize in honor of Jake Adam York, and directed the reading series at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art. Keetje has also been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, and the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She has received fellowships from the Lucas Artist Residency at Montalvo Arts Center, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, among others. She has given hundreds of readings, craft talks, lectures, and workshops internationally. Additionally, in 2022, Keetje was honored to be one of the judges of the National Book Award in Poetry. In 2024, Keetje is thrilled to be one of the judges – along with Tarfia Faizullah and Barbara Jane Reyes – of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.

She lives with her wife and children in Montana as an uninvited guest on land that is the longtime home of the Salish and Kalispel peoples.

Short Bio

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poetry from BOA Editions, and the Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Northwest. Her upcoming collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, is the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and was called “elegant, earthy, [and] pertinent,” by Marilyn Hacker. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her subsequent books, The Keys to the Jail and All Its Charms, include poems honored with publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and over a hundred other publications. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf Fellow, the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and a former board member and Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in Montana with her wife and children.

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