Candice
Kelsey

Candice is a poet, essayist, educator, and scholar of American literature. She holds a B.A. in English from Miami University and an M.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University and has taught literature and writing for nearly three decades.

Her scholarly interests center on nineteenth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, literary age studies, embodiment, memory, and feminist and queer approaches to literary study. Her current research considers Herman Melville’s later poetry and the ways aging, memory, embodiment, and mortality shape poetic knowledge and form. Her critical writing on Melville, poetry, and the body has appeared in The Rumpus and The Hopkins Review.

Kelsey is also the author of several collections of poetry and prose, including Another Place Altogether (Kelsay Books, 2025) and The Biology of Leaving (Rockwood Press, 2026). Her creative work has appeared in Poet Lore, Painted Bride Quarterly, SWWIM, and other journals and has received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review and as an AWP Poetry Mentor.

Across her scholarship, teaching, and creative practice, Kelsey is interested in the ways literature makes embodied experience legible, specifically how reading across a lifetime changes what texts allow us to know about the world and ourselves.