Brigit Pegeen Kelly taught in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her first volume of poetry, To the Place of Trumpets, was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1987 and published by Yale University Press the following year. Her second book, Song, published by BOA Editions Ltd., was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, The Orchard, also published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2004, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work appeared widely in journals and anthologies and she was awarded many prizes and fellowships, including a Whiting Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Witter Bynner Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.