About

Kelan Nee is a poet, writer, editor, educator, and carpenter from Massachusetts. Before returning to academia in 2020 to pursue an MFA he worked as a wooden boat builder and house carpenter in Maine and Massachusetts. While writing and teaching are his two true loves, he has continued to work throughout his time as an MFA and PhD student, working in shops from Houston, Texas to Providence, Rhode Island, focusing on restoration carpentry, furniture making, and high end cabinetry and millwork. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Houston, Johnson & Wales University and in community workshops and festivals across America. His work, both in the shop and on the page, is informed by habitual looking and thinking alongside rigorous inquiry and play. Kelan’s entire life is informed by immense amounts of gratitude and appreciation. He is a true lover of fun, so much so that he has a somewhat regrettable tattoo announcing as much on his chest.

His debut collection, Felling, was published in the spring of 2024 by University of North Texas Press, as the winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize. His second collection, HABIT, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company in the summer of 2027. Individual poems can be found in print or online from journals and magazines including POETRY, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, The Academy of American Poets, Image, Meridian, The Colorado Review, 32 Poems among others. His Nonfiction can be found in The Paris Review and the Sewanee Review.

Photo Courtesy of Tyler Murgo

His awards and fellowships include a 2026 Sewanee Review Nonfiction Prize, a 2025 Donald Barthleme Prize in Poetry and a 2024 award in Fiction from the Inprint Foundation, 2023 Gregory Djankian Scholarship awarded by The Adroit Journal, and Academy of American Poets prizes in 2021 and 2024 among others.

He is a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at The University of Houston with a focus on critical poetics and holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA from Colorado College.