Artist of the Year

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Kessler has distinguished himself over the last 50 years as one of his generation’s most versatile and prolific writers, author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, 16 books of literary translation, three collections of essays, and a novel, The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press, 2009).  He has edited numerous literary journals and community newspapers and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics, 2010).  Locally in recent years he is best known as a wide-ranging and freethinking opinion columnist in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. During most of the 1970s and ’80s he was active as an organizer of and advocate for the Santa Cruz poetry community, putting on readings, writing reviews and essays in the local weeklies, and cohosting with Gary Young The Poetry Show and Bards After Dark on KUSP radio. He is known nationally and internationally as a translator of modern Spanish and Latin American poets including the Argentine master Borges, Nobel laureates Vicente Aleixandre and Pablo Neruda, the exiled Spaniard Luis Cernuda, and the Argentine expatriate Julio Cortázar.