Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer and teacher currently living in the L.A. area. Kearney’s poetry has appeared in journals including Callaloo, nocturnes, jubilat, Mangrove, Ache and The Ethiop’s Ear; as well as several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page, Role Call, the World Fantasy Award-Winning Dark Matter: Reading the Bones and Saints of Hysteria which will feature a collaboration with Kearney and Harryette Mullen.

 He has written and performed for a number of audio recordings as well as for television. He has been a featured performer at venues across the country, including the New York Public Theater, the Orpheum in Minneapolis, Locus Arts in San Francisco and the World Stage in Los Angeles and has received commissions from the Weisman Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem to create poetry in response to art installations. He has exhibited InJury, a series combining poetry and image, at the 2005 Afro-Geek Conference at UC Santa Barbara.

His thesis, an opera libretto written in an invented language, has earned several collaborators including John Duykers, Missy Weaver, Grisha Coleman, Erling Wold, Eisa Davis, Wes Hambright and the Alpert-award winning Anne LeBaron, for whom he assistant-directed Wet, an opera which premiered at REDCAT in December 2005. He is also working with LeBaron on the lyrics for a song cycle called “Sucktion.”

Kearney has received fellowships and/or scholarships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writer’s Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Idyllwild Summer Arts Poetry Workshop as well as an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. He is on the advisory board for the innovative journal of literary arts, nocturnes.

His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, some is now available through Red Hen Press.

The poet, David St. John, has this to say about Douglas’ work: “Douglas Kearney is one of the most exciting and innovative poets now writing in America. Adventurous, irreverent, imaginative and explosive, Douglas Kearney writes a poetry that is resonant with hip-hop and jazz rhythms yet is timeless in its power and beauty.”