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), All its Charms (2019), and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), which received the Isabella Gardner Award. Her work has been included in the anthologies Environmental and Nature Writing (2025), The Book of Poetry for Hard Times (2021), The Best American Poetry (2016), and The Pushcart Prize (2015).

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.” These geographies also include the geography of the body. Describing Kuipers’s poems as “wickedly erotic and ingenious,” Publishers Weekly notes in a review of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers that the poet “expertly mixes frank expressions of sexual desire with the domestic, subverting common preconceptions and breaking arbitrary boundaries surrounding the body.”
 
Kuipers’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Storyknife, Jentel Artist Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and T.S. Eliot House. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Kuipers has also been a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, as well as a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is Editor of Poetry Northwest, co-director of the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being, and is a member of the faculty at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano. She lives with her wife and children in Missoula, MT.