Announcing the 2025-2026 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet

The Creative Writing Program of the University of Georgia is happy to announce that the 2025-2026 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet is Karla Kelsey. Kelsey will visit Athens between November 11-12, 2025 for a series of events as part of the Blakely Program. In the spring, Kelsey will judge the entries in the 2025-2026 Diann Blakely National Poetry Competition for Emerging Poets. To be notified about the competition, please subscribe here. 

You van view all the details of the events along with the entire Blakely Archive by visiting blakely.uga.edu.

Karla Kelsey is poet and essayist whose work weaves together the lyric with philosophy and history. Her poetry books include On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023), Blood Feather (Tupelo Press, 2020), A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), Iteration Nets (Ahsahta, 2010), and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta, 2006) selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published in 2017. She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, (Yale University Press in 2024). Her poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy was recently released from Winter Editions.

Poems and prose have been published by such journals as Bomb, Fence, Conjunctions, New American Writing, The Boston Review, Verse, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her critical essays on poetry, poetics, and pedagogy have appeared in anthologies and literary journals.

From 2010-2017 she edited Constant Critic, Fence Books' online journal of poetry reviews. She currently co-publishes with Aaron McCollough SplitLevel Texts, a press specializing in hybrid genre projects. With Poupeh Missaghi she edited the first volume of Matters of Feminist Practice, a journal of feminist criticism published by Belladonna* Collaborative. An H.D. Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars grant, she has taught in Budapest, Hungary, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.