Author Keetje Kuipers, 2025-26 Walton Visiting Writer in Poetry, to Read in Fayetteville

The U of A Program in Creative Writing and Translation in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences will welcome poet Keetje Kuipers as its 2025-26 Walton Visiting Writer in Poetry.

Kuipers will read at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 10, at the Ziegler Room in the Fayetteville Public Library. The event is free and open to the public, and a book signing will follow the reading.

Kuipers is the author of four books of poetry from BOA Editions and the editor-in-chief of Poetry Northwest. Her collection Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is the winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was called "elegant, earthy [and] pertinent," by Marilyn Hacker. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. Her subsequent books, The Keys to the Jail and All Its Charms, include poems honored with publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. 

Each year, the Walton Visiting Writers series in the Program in Creative Writing and Translation brings esteemed authors in poetry, fiction and literary translation to the U of A to give free public readings and to work with graduate students in the creative writing M.F.A. program. Recent Walton Visiting Poets include Kayleb Rae Candrilli in 2023-24, Jane Hirshfield in 2022-23 and Rachel Mennies in 2021-22.

This event is made possible by the Program in Creative Writing and Translation, the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Walton Family Foundation, the Fayetteville Public Library and the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Professorship in Creative Writing.