Kelly Lenox

Author + Translator

There is no other way to tell it. No label for the map. Some seasons, a salt intrusion. Brackish water is birthplace, nursery that stocks the seas and skies. This brown feather is pliable, downy. This translucent shell protected, then constrained. Sediment sifts past reed-stems. Makes hidey homes in silt clouds. Snails speckle the marsh grass orange as they cling and feed on the breath of tide. My pulse and my prayer. The homeland I cannot claim. My vowels rise, curl, and flatten on a shore that’s ever elsewhere. My first word was water.

From ‘Water, Road and Rock,’ published in Split Rock Review

At age 40, I began graduate school in creative writing. All along, my poems have been influenced by geology, drawing on images of tunnels, mines, mountain ranges, caves, and, of course, rocks. Trees, plants, and water in all its forms also provide touchstones for the journeys of the poems.

I coordinated the Vermont College of Fine Arts summer residency in Slovenia from 2006 through 2010 and edited for literary journals including Hunger Mountain and Rain City Review. I also taught as a poet in the schools in Portland, Oregon. In late 2018, I moved from Durham, NC back to Portland, OR and learned a new definition of home.

I am the associate news editor for Environmental Health Perspectives, a scientific journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. I hold a Masters of Fine Arts from Vermont College and a Bachelors degree in environmental science from the University of Virginia.