Kit (Christopher) Kelen teaches Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at the Unviersity of Macau, where he has been a full-time faculty member for the last five years.
Introduction
Kelen's (only recently commenced) work as a visual artist - in photography, ink and wash drawing/painting and in pseudo-calligraphic styles - has appeared in a number of on-line journals and web-sites, as cover illustrations for several books and in conference presentations, most recently at the Imaginal Regions Symposium at Gray's School of Art (Robert Gordon University), Aberdeen, U.K., sponsored by the U.K.'s Arts and Humanities Research Board.
Cross-media, cross-cultural and cross-genre endeavours are the hallmark of Kelen's aesthetic output and this interest in work ‘between' anticipated forms and cultural milieu makes Macao an ideal place for his art practice. Kelen has written a considerable body of poetry and prose fiction set in Macao and/or dealing with Macao related subject matter. He has also written and recorded a number of Macao themed multilingual songs, including the blues ballad ‘San Ma Lo' and a hymn to road safety, ‘You've got to make yourself big when you're crossing the road.' (The latter is in Cantonese, Portuguese, Putonghua and English.)
Award
Kelen is a well known Australian poet whose works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen's work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp'. Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process, from UWS Nepean. Kelen's first volume of poetry The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. In 1988 Kelen had won an ABA/ABC bicentennial award with his poem ‘Views from Pinchgut'. In 1996 Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest, conducted by Island journal. He also won second prize in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Award that year. In 2000 Kelen's poetry/art collaboration (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan/Big Hat Mountain was exhibited at the Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong's Fringe Club. And in 2001 another collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng/Sleep to Dream was shown at the Montblanc Gallery. Both exhibitions have been published as full colour catalogues. Kelen's fourth book of poems, Republics, dealing with the ethics of identity in millennial Australia, was published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000. A fifth volume, New Territories - a pilgrimage through Hong Kong, structured after Danté's Divine Comedy - was published with the aid of the Hong Kong Arts Development Board in 2003. In 2004 Kelen's most recent chapbook Wyoming Suite - a North American sojurn - was released by VAC Publishing in Chicago. Apart from poetry Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and literary studies and various intersections of these. Kelen also writes prose fiction (including children's stories) and records original compositions - especially in the blues genre - for the guitar.
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