Douglas Kearney

Poet, interdisciplinary writer, and performer Douglas Kearney’s full-length poetry collections include Sho (Wave Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, Pen America, Hurston/Wright, Kingsley Tufts, and Big Other Book Award; Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award; Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014); The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009); and Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, 2006). He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. Kearney is also the librettist of Someone Took They Tongues: 3 Operas (2016) and has staged four operas, including Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, and Sweet Land, winner of the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best Opera of 2021. 

Kearney’s Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022), a collection of talks he presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021, won the 2023 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and the 2023 Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction. His poetry has been included in anthologies that include The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007, edited by Nikky Finney), Spoken Word Revolution Redux (Sourcebooks, 2007, edited by Mark Eleveld), Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (Grand Central Publishing, 2005, edited by Sheree R. Thomas), and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature (2002, edited by Tony Medina, Samiya Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana).

Kearney’s lyrical poems range across the page, bridging thematic concerns that include politics, African American culture, masks, the trickster figure, and contemporary music. He describes the nontraditional layout of his poems as “performative typography.” As he said in a conversation with poet Amaud J. Johnson for the Boxcar Poetry Review, “I wanted to take what I knew about poetics and, say, graphic design and try to figure out the dynamics of certain poetic devices.” In the same conversation, Kearney discussed the relationship between his poetry and politics: “For me, the political is a part of how I see the world … my art making doesn’t begin without realizing who I am and what it means for me to be writing a poem and not doing something else.” In the Los Angeles Times, poet David St. John observed, “What Doug’s articulating is the fragmentation of the self and sensibility that you see prominently in T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. He’s at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place.”

Kearney grew up in Altadena, California. He earned a BA from Howard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and is also a graduate and fellow of Cave Canem. Kearney’s honors include a Whiting Award, a Pushcart nomination, and commissions for new work from the Minneapolis Weisman Art Museum and the New York Studio Museum. In 2007, the Poetry Society of America named him a notable new American poet. Kearney has received support from the Idyllwild Summer Arts Poetry Workshop, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award, he teaches at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow.