Poet, interdisciplinary writer, and performer Douglas Kearney grew up in Altadena, CA. He earned his BA from Howard University, his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and is a graduate and fellow of Cave Canem. Kearney’s full-length poetry collections include Fear, Some (2006), The Black Automaton (2009), which was chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series, and Patter (2014). He has also published many chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), Spoken Word Revolution Redux (2007), Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2005), and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature (2002). Kearney’s honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart nomination, and commissions for new work from Minneapolis’s Weisman Art Museum and New York’s Studio Museum. In 2007, he was named a Notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America. Kearney has also received fellowships and scholarships from the Idyllwild Summer Arts Poetry Workshop, Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Cy Twombly Award. He teaches at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
