Name: Christopher (Kit) Kelen

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

  Christopher Kelen is a well known Australian poet
  whose works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid
  seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes
  Kelen’s work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’. Kelen
  holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of
  Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process, from UWS
  Nepean. Kelen’s first volume of poetry The Naming of the Harbour and the
  Trees won an Anne Elder Award in 1992.In 1988 Kelen had won an ABA/ABC
  bicentennial award with his poem ‘Views from Pinchgut’. In 1996 Kelen
  was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting
  Library in Rome. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest,
  conducted by Island journal. He also won second prize in the Gwen
  Harwood Poetry Award that year. In 2000 Kelen’s poetry/art collaboration
  (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan/Big Hat Mountain was exhibited at the
  Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong’s Fringe Club. And in 2001 another
  collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng/Sleep to Dream
  was shown at the Montblanc Gallery. Both exhibitions have been published
  as full colour catalogues. Kelen’s fourth book of poems, Republics,
  dealing with the ethics of identity in millennial Australia, was
  published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000. A fifth volume,
  New Territories – a pilgrimage through Hong Kong, structured after
  Danté’s Divine Comedy – was published with the aid of the Hong Kong Arts
  Development Board in 2003. In 2004 Kelen’s most recent chapbook Wyoming
  Suite – a North American sojurn – was released by VAC Publishing in
  Chicago. Apart from poetry Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical
  areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and
  literary studies and various intersections of these. Kelen currently
  teaches Creative Writing and Children’s Literature at the University of
  Macau in South China. Kelen is the principal investigator in the
  University of Macau’s ‘Poems and Stories of Macao Research Project’ and
  the editor of the on-line journal Writing Macao: creative text and
  teaching.


 

 

Filed under : DIRECTORY  - Writers 

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