Keetje Kuipers

Award-winning Poet
Essayist, Story Writer, Editor

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • On Failure
  • Line Cook
  • The Poet As Parent
  • An Evening with Keetje Kuipers

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

Writer and editor Keetje Kuipers (pronounced Kay-tcha Ky-pers) is the author of three books of poems, all published by BOA Editions. Her first, Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), 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. Selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, it was named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers and appeared in the top ten on the contemporary poetry bestseller list. The Keys to the Jail (2014) asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires. It was a book club selection for The Rumpus. Her most recent collection, All Its Charms (2019) is about much more than the reinvention of the American family―it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be. Beth Ann Fennelly writes that All Its Charms “delights in the usually overlooked moments in nature and human nature. In these small moments, she locates our big truths.”

Keetje’s poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in over a hundred journals and magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Narrative, Tin House, VQR, American Poetry Review, Orion, Kenyon Review, and The Believer. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac and honored by The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.

Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She is the recipient of 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.

Keetje has taught at universities across the country, most recently as Associate Professor at Auburn University where she was Editor of Southern Humanities Review and directed the reading series at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. She has given hundreds of readings, craft talks, lectures, and workshops around the country.

She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.

Short Bio

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poetry: Beautiful in the Mouth, The Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms, which includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwestand a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.

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