Douglas Kearney

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood, and was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney’s second book, National Poetry Series selection The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity, and book learning.” A collection of opera libretti — including one written in a counterfeit African diasporic language — will be published by Subito Press in 2015. Noemi Press will publish his collection of writing on poetics and performativity — Mess And Mess And — in late 2015. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and residencies and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Callaloo. Raised in Altadena, California, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.

Photo courtesy of Eric Plattner.