Friends of the University Libraries

Silver Pen Award Recipient 2001
Claudia Keelan

Claudia Keelan is a poet and associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a graduate of Humboldt State University (B.A.), and of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A.). She has been a Nevada resident since 1996.

Claudia Keelan has published three books of poems:

• Refinery
• The Secularist (nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award and finalist for PEN West award)
• Utopic (Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Academy of American Poets.)

For Keelan, the power of words came from a college teacher, poet Jorie Graham. "She spoke with such authority regarding the human condition," said Keelan. "Unlike my other professors, she didn’t speak from a distance – she lived through her teaching and we could feel it. She was the first poet I met and she was a major influence on me as a young woman."

Keelan, who was a music major in college, followed a roundabout way to poetry, the literary form, she says, that brought her closest to "what is called the truth."

"When I found that the truth I heard in the music of Mozart or Bach, John Coltrane or Thelonimous Monk would never be available to me through the clarinet or piano," she said, "I turned my attention to what has become my only instrument: language." It has been said that the inspiration to write poetry comes from "a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, recollected in solitude." Pshaw, says Keelan, who agrees with the first part, but not the solitude bit. Keelan is a live-in-the-moment poet: "Writing poetry is my work and I do it within the continued present that is my life," she said.

Hers is a life of interruptions, attending the needs of her son, husband and students. All that finds its way into her work. "I don’t need inspiration," she said. "All I need is a page and the willingness to let what comes in be the poem."

— Sandra Macias (Friends Newsletter, Fall 2001)