Robert Kelly (poet)

Kelly and Charlotte Mandell co-founded Metambesen.org(exploring the "flanges of words") in 2014. The homepage reads: "As citizens in the commonwealth of language, we are anxious to make new work freely and easily available, using the swift herald of the internet to bring readers chapbooks and other texts they can read and download without cost." To date they have published over forty texts.

The play Oedipus After Colonus takes as its point of departure Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles: it was first performed in 2010 under the direction of Crichton Atkinson at the HERE Arts Center in New York City as a part of HEREstay Festival - September, 2010.

Kelly is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College (1986–) and Co-Director of The Program in Written Arts. He is a Founding Member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time. He serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions, as well as Poetry International. He is married to the translator Charlotte Mandell.

Kelly has worked as a translator and teacher, most notably at Bard College, where he has worked since 1961. Kelly's other teaching positions have included Wagner College (1960–61), the University at Buffalo (1964), and the Tufts University Visiting Professor of Modern Poetry (1966–67). In addition, he has served as Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology (1971–72), Yale University (Calhoun College), University of Kansas, Dickinson College, and the University of Southern California.

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965). Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roy Choudhury, with whom he had correspondence, now archived at Kolkata.

Robert Kelly (born September 24, 1935) is an American poet associated with the deep image group. He is the 2016-2017 Poet Laureate of Dutchess County, New York.

Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955. He then spent three years at Columbia University.