Kerry Shawn Keys

Kerry Shawn Keys' work ranges from under-mountain vagrant-pastoral and urban-salvage to theater-dance pieces to flamenco lyrics to children's books to meditations on the Tao Te Ching to a polyphonic epic poem composed from his South India journals. He is the author of dozens of books, most recent among them Pienas (prose tales and plays), 2013; New Poems from China, 1917-2017, co-translated with Ming Di, 2019; Black Ice (poems), 2020; Shoelaces for Chagall, Love Poems (bilingual German/ English...See more

Kerry Shawn Keys' work ranges from under-mountain vagrant-pastoral and urban-salvage to theater-dance pieces to flamenco lyrics to children's books to meditations on the Tao Te Ching to a polyphonic epic poem composed from his South India journals. He is the author of dozens of books, most recent among them Pienas (prose tales and plays), 2013; New Poems from China, 1917-2017, co-translated with Ming Di, 2019; Black Ice (poems), 2020; Shoelaces for Chagall, Love Poems (bilingual German/ English), 2021; and Alphabet of Dreams, (bilingual Lithuanian/English, poems), 2023. Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He was a Senior Fulbright Research grantee for African-Brazilian studies in Salvador, Brazil, and from 1998 to 2000 taught translation theory and creative composition as a Fulbright Associate Professor at Vilnius University. See less