Keetje Kuipers

Keetje Kuipers was born in Pullman, Washington. She earned her BA at Swarthmore College and her MFA at the University of Oregon. Her collections of poetry include Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which won an A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All its Charms (2019). In her poems, Kuipers ranges over and across landscapes with “an unmistakable sense of adventure,” in poet Eavan Boland’s phrase. In an interview, Kuipers herself noted that “geography has become of primary importance to me, and the battle for belonging—and the butting together of disparate and conflicting geographies that express different parts of myself—are clearly hashed out in my poetry.”
 
Kuipers’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oregon Literary Arts. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Kuipers has also been a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident and an Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She serves as a senior editor at Poetry Northwest, is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, and teaches on the faculty of the Hugo House in Seattle. She lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea.