George Keithley award-winning epic poem The Donner Party was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and has been adapted as a play and an opera. Joyce Carol Oates has praised Keithley as possessing "Whitman's visionary imagination." He and his wife live in Chico, California.

About The Starry Messenger:

"A notable event in poetry; an experiment that triumphantly succeeds."
—X. J. Kennedy

"Who better than George Keithley-renowned for his ability to fill a huge narrative canvas with the poetry of acutely rendered detail-to take up the story of Galileo, and so of all of our venturing into a universe of enlarged knowledge, being, and connection? The Starry Messenger holds a truly remarkable, and moving, series of poems."
—Jane Hirshfield

"Stubborn, irascible, truth-obsessed, Galileo is a living presence, his Venice teeming with Carnevale, fearful of the Inquisition, vividly realized in The Starry Messenger."
—Daniel Hoffman

"George Keithley writes a poetry of lyrical beauty, historical awareness, philosophical nuance, and serene clarity. His vision is sequential and uncommonly humane. Keithley's poetry possesses a quality one can neither teach nor purchase: that of grace."
—Marvin Bell