Hello and welcome! Here's a bit about me.
I live in Kentucky with my two dogs. My son studies Political Economies in California. Most days I walk, practice yoga, and watch for turtle families in a nearby pond. I adore travel. I recently fell in love with Romania after acting as a Fulbright Scholar in Cluj-Napoca at Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai in 2020, and I brought 25 students to Transylvania May 2024. I am also a proud recipient of a Fulbright Award to Poland 2025. Poland has always been a dream destination for me. I grew as a poet reading the great Polish poets.
Professionally, I am a Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. Teaching is my life's work, and I feel privileged to be with my students--a generation that is changing the political landscape right before my eyes all while being brave enough to be vulnerable and take risks on the page. I won the college-wide award of Teacher of the Year when I taught at Kentucky Wesleyan College. At my current institution, I have won the English Professor of the Year Award as well as two university-wide awards: Outstanding Junior Faculty Member and Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring. Here is a recently published article about my work at NKU that is so beautiful and humbling it nearly brought me to tears: "Kelly Moffett and Her Love of Language."
I have three full-length collections of poetry and two chapbooks (the most recent is titled Just After). My poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Rattle, Barrelhouse, Versal, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, MidAmerican Review, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Cortland Review, and my work has been featured in the following anthologies: The Giant Book of Poetry, Even the Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry, and New Writing: An Anthology. I am a proud recipient of six grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and of three residencies in Ireland through Salmon Literary Centre and the Burren Art College. I was honored to act as an artistic consultant for the Mourning the Creation of Racial Categories project as well as an author in the essay collection How to Respond in a Pandemic: 25 Ideas from 25 Disciplines of Study.
Contact: [email protected]
Instagram: kellyamoffett