Professor Kelly writes poetry. Her first collection of poems, To The Place of Trumpets (1987), was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Song (1995) was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, The Orchard (2004), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the National Book Circle Critics Award in Poetry. Her work has also appeared in several volumes of the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.

In 2008 she was awarded a fellowship by the Academy of American Poets in recognition of her distinguished poetic achievement. In 2002 the University of Illinois awarded her both humanities and campus-wide recognition for excellence in teaching. Her other honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award, along with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois State Council on the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.

In memoriam