Keetje Kuipers
Poet and educator Keetje Kuipers was born in Pullman, Washington, the daughter of a fishing guide and a sociologist. She earned her BA at Swarthmore College and her MFA at the University of Oregon. During her time as a student, her major poetic influences included Rainer Maria Rilke, Larry Levis, and Kimiko Hahn. Before pursuing a career as a poet, she worked at a range of jobs, from baker to actress to publishing assistant.
Kuipers’ debut poetry collection, Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA Editions, 2010), was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers. Her second book, The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), was selected by The Rumpus as a book club selection. All Its Charms (BOA, 2019), her latest collection, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes award-winning poems published in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.
Kuipers’ poetry often engages with the distinctive local ecosystems in the many places she has lived, bringing nature into dialogue with the domestic. As she tells 32 Poems, “While I am a writer and a mother no matter where I live, those roles are uniquely limited by the landscape where they take place. Any writing that I do wishes to investigate that transformation of identity.” Her writing, including short stories and essays as well as poetry, has appeared in more than one hundred journals and magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Narrative, Tin House, VQR, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, Kenyon Review, and The Believer. Her poetry has been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac.
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Kuipers has also been the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oregon Literary Arts, Lucas Artist Residency at Montalvo Arts Center, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, among others. She has taught at universities across the country, including as Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana and as Associate Professor at Auburn University, where she was Editor of Southern Humanities Review and founded the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
In 2020, Kuipers became Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Northwest. Her accomplishments there include establishing the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets and the magazine’s annual Anti-Racism Report. She serves on advisory board for the dual-language writers’ conference Under the Volcano, located in Tepoztlán, Mexico, and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle as Deputy VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In 2022, she was one of the judges of the National Book Award in poetry. Kuipers lives with her wife and children in Missoula, Montana, where she is at work on a fourth book of poems, a memoir, and a novel.
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More Keetje Kuipers
Text: Two poems by Kuipers at Four Way Review
Audio: Kuipers' poem "At Forty, the Mountains Are More Green" featured on The Slowdown
Video: Kuipers appears on the series Poets of Montana
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Photo by Matthew Thompson.