Paige Ackerson-Kiely was born in October 1975 in Biddeford, Maine. She is a modern poet and also works for the Poetry Journal Handsome. She currently lives in Peekskill, New York.[1]
Paige Ackerson-Kiely received a BA in Asian Studies from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Prior to this, she attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, Marmara University in Istanbul, and Birzeit University in Birzeit, Palestine.[2]
Ackerson-Kiely is the author of In No One's Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007), a book of poetry that was selected for the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by D. A. Powell. This book also won the award for Poets & Writers Exchange.[3] Her second full-length collection of poetry, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) [4] began as a response to Admiral Richard E. Byrd's memoir, Alone. In February, 2019, Penguin/Random House published her third volume of poetry, Dolefully, A Rampart Stands.[5] About this collection, Publishers Weekly wrote that the "language here is stark and devastating."[6]
Ackerson-Kiely has produced a limited edition art folio, This Landscape (Argos Books 2010),[7] and prose chapbook Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed (above/ground 2011).[8] She has been published in Pleiades, Bellingham Review, Ninth Letter, jubilat, LIT, and The Laurel Review.[9] In 2009 she was one of the featured authors in the all-poetry edition of The Laurel Review, an edition that was dedicated to the memory of poet Reginald Shepherd.[10] She is currently a co-editor for Black Ocean's poetry journal Handsome,[11] associate director of the Program in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College,[12] and faculty member at the New England College MFA program.[13]