WriterBrigit Pegeen Kelly

Brigit Pegeen Kelly's book The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004) was named a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Kelly's other poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a Finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press), selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Additional awards and honors include a Discovery/The Nation award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Kelly teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois, and has also taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, and Warren Wilson College, as well as numerous writers' conferences in the United States and Ireland.