Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. program for writers. She has won a number of awards for her work, including the Discovery/The Nation prize, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, To The Place of Trumpets. Her poems have appeared in many of the country's distinguished journals and anthologies; two of her poems have been selected for the collection Best American Poetry, and one has been chosen for The Pushcart Prize XIX.

About The Orchard:

"Imagine a tapestry in which every color, itself resplendent, is couched next to another, equally brilliant hue. Such is Kelly's work, so gorgeous in its language, so vivid in its sonorousness. She is both lavish and demanding. Her images unfold intuitively, hypnotically. Her rhythms and repetitions drive the poems beyond mere logic into passion. Kelly's poetry is symphonic, and each poem is best appreciated as a total composition rather than as a series of melodic lines."
—Booklist

"Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States. In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet, but in Kelly's work, especially in her new book The Orchard, it happens again and again. For a lover of poetry, the result in pure exhilaration."
—Stephen Dobyns