Stephen Kessler

Stephen Kessler was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and received a BA in languages and literature from Bard College as well as an MA from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kessler is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, which include Scratch Pegasus (Swan Scythe Press, 2013); The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010); and Burning Daylight (Littoral Press, 2007). His translations of the poet Luis Cernuda have received numerous awards, including a Lambda Literary Award for Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda (City Lights, 2004) and the Harold Morton Landon Award for translation from the Academy of American Poets for Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009).

Kessler’s other books of translation include The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin, 2010); Eyeseas by Raymond Queneau (Black Widow Press, 2008), which he translated with Daniela Hurezanu; Aphorisms (Green Integer, 2002) by César Vallejo; Ode to Typography (Peter Koch, 1998) by Pablo Neruda; Save Twilight: Selected Poems of Julio Cortázar (City Lights Books, 1997); and From Beirut (Pygmy Forest Press, 1992) by Mahmoud Darwish.

In response to Kessler’s work, poet Gary Young said, “[He] has mapped the emotional expanses determined by the harsh borders of longing and loss, sexual attraction and sexual release, mystical union and mystical dissolve, and his poems—by turns tender, ironic, furious, and wry—pulse with the soulful syncopation of the heart.”

Kessler was a founding editor and publisher of Alcatraz, an international journal, and the Sun, a Santa Cruz weekly newspaper, among other independent publishing ventures. He lives in California where he is the editor of the quarterly literary newspaper, The Redwood Coast Review.