Killarney Clary

Killarney Clary was born in 1953 in Los Angeles and was raised in Pasadena, California. She received a BFA in studio art and an MFA in poetry from the University of California Irvine.

Clary is the author of Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Potential Stranger (University of Chicago Press, 2003); By Common Salt (Oberlin College Press, 1996); and Who Whispered Near Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Clary is known for her powerful, often enigmatic prose poems. Stephen Burt writes,

Clary works in the tradition of modern novelists (Virginia Woolf, for example), who asks us to trust their characters’ streams of consciousness, but also in a tradition of prose poetry stretching back to [Charles] Baudelaire.

In 1992, Clary received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2011, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at the University of California Irvine and in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in California.