Kelly Cherry wrestles with the complicated figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, both the “father of the atomic bomb” and the flesh-and-blood man, from his early upbringing to his work with the Manhattan Project.
Her poems explore his formation and education, coming inevitably to rest with his best-known achievement: “The atom would reveal / a power incommensurate with its size. / The skies would open their doors, the firmament shift. / A man would find and lose and find himself.”
Kelly Cherry has previously published twenty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award, a USIS Speaker Award (The Philippines), a Distinguished Alumnus Award, three Wisconsin Arts Board fellowships, the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for Distinguished Book of Stories in 1999 (2000), The Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and selection as a Wisconsin Notable Author.
Poet Laureate Emerita of Virginia and a member of the Electorate of Poets Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, she is also Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She and her husband live in Virginia.
