Douglas Kearney is a poet and performer and teacher. His poetry has appeared in journals including Callaloo, nocturnes, jubilat, Gulf Coast and others; as well as several anthologies, including The Ringing Ear, Role Call, the World Fantasy Award-Winning Dark Matter: Reading the Bones and Saints of Hysteria which features a collaboration with Kearney and Harryette Mullen.

He has written and performed for a number of audio recordings as well as for television. He has been a featured performer at venues across the country, including the New York Public Theater, the Orpheum in Minneapolis, Locus Arts in San Francisco and the World Stage in Los Angeles and has received commissions from the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and the Studio Museum in Harlem to create poetry in response to art installations. He has exhibited InJury: 4/29/92, a series combining poetry and image, at UC Santa Barbara’s 2005 Afro-Geek Conference.

His thesis, an opera libretto written in an invented language fusing vernaculars throughout the African Diaspora, has earned Kearney several collaborators including Grisha Coleman, John Duykers (vocalist), Missy Weaver (director), Erling Wold (composer), Pulitzer Prize runner-up Eisa Davis (Playwright), Wes Hambright (composer) and the Alpert-award winning composer Anne LeBaron, for whom he assistant-directed Wet, an opera that premiered at REDCAT in December 2005. In 2007, Kearney and LeBaron received a Mapfund Grant on their song cycle,“Sucktion.”

Kearney was named a notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America (2007) and was honored with one of the first Returning Fellow fellowships at the Idyllwild Summer Arts Poetry Workshop (2007). He has received fellowships and/or scholarships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writer’s Workshop and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference as well as an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His areas of interest include poetics, hip hop culture, design, advertising and myth. His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, Some was published by Red Hen Press in October 2006.