Kelly Nelson

Knife River, Thief Lake is a book-length collection of poems that traces the life of poet Kelly Nelson’s uncle, based on his 500-page prison record. Though she never personally met this uncle, Nelson is re-creating a narrative of his life through the prison documents she’s acquired from the Minnesota Historical Society archives.

This project has led Nelson’s writing into the field of documentary poetry as she uses poetic forms and techniques to create a historical narrative of real life events. Just as found art incorporates items and elements not created by the artist, found poetry includes words, phrases and sentences written by someone else. In this case, the language the poet is borrowing comes from prison evaluations and reports, court transcripts, letters and newspaper articles. Nelson also weaves her own voice into the narrative as she tells the story of uncovering this family secret. In addition, Nelson is also interviewing people who knew her uncle and building their voices into the story.

“This project is challenging me to learn new techniques such as collage, erasure and textual sampling as well as to experiment with how my poems appear on the page,” Nelson reported in her application. “I am honing my skills in synthesis and composition as I stitch together these found and original elements into a cohesive story.”

Knife River, Thief Lake fuses the narrative element of nonfiction biography with the compression and imagination of poetry. What’s emerging is a hybrid form Nelson calls lyric found biography. In telling her uncle’s story, Nelson is also offering a slice of social history about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, about prison life and mental health in the 1950s and 1960s, and about the people who were left behind during the post-World War II economic boom in America. It’s a story of escape and confinement, of second chances and failings, of deception and discovery.

Kelly Nelson is a poet and teacher based in Tempe.

She is the author of two chapbooks, Who Was I to Say I Was Alive and Rivers I Don’t Live By, winner of the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series Award.

Her poetry has appeared in more than 40 literary journals and she has performed her poems at coffee shops, book stores, galleries, diners, farmers markets, the Houston Poetry Festival, the Phoenix Art Museum and on the Phoenix Light Rail.

She holds an M.S. in Adult Education and teaches poetry classes through ASU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. She serves as a judge for Tempe’s Community Writing Contest, volunteers as a gallery docent at the Tempe Center for the Arts and serves on her city’s arts and culture commission.

Kelly received a 2014 Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts in support of her first full-length collection: a lyric, found biography of her uncle based on his 500-page prison record.

Nelson is a Senior Lecturer at Arizona State University where she’s been teaching Interdisciplinary Studies since 1999.

To learn more about Kelly and her work, please visit www.kelly-nelson.com