Robert Kelly

after receiving an undergraduate degree in 1955 from the City College of the City University of New York, he studied for three years at Columbia University. He is a co –  founder of the Chelsea Review (now Chelsea) and Trobar magazine. After publishing his first collection of poems, Armed Descent, in 1961, he went on to publish more than fifty poetry titles, including Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News (1980), which received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award; Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960 –1993 (1995); Lapis (2005); and May Day (Parsifal Press, 2007). His poems and stories have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Serbian. He has received an Award for Distinction from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Wagner College, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and as the Tufts University Visiting Professor of Modern Poetry. He has also served as Poet in Residence at Yale University (Calhoun College), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Kansas University, Dickinson College, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Southern California.  He currently serves as Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature and Co – Director of the Program in Written Arts at Bard College, where he has taught since 1961.