BU Humanists At Work: Karl Kirchwey, Professor of English
Writer, Professor of English, and Director of the Creative Writing Program Karl Kirchwey had an unconventional journey to academia. Unlike most professors, he spent the majority of his career as a curator and arts director, both in the U.S and abroad. His time in arts administration has given him insight into public interaction with the arts and exposed him to work and ideas that continue to shape his career in academia and as a writer.
Kirchwey served as Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Y in New York from 1987-2000, where he ran the largest 
curated reading series in the U.S. “My literary education took place at the 92nd Street Y,” Kirchwey says, recounting the impact that the Monday night literary events had on his own experiences. Readings by poets, fiction writers, essayists, playwrights, and actors strengthened Kirchwey’s belief in the connectivity of the arts and helped him see how poetry could act as a “sister art” to other practices. Readings included explorations of the connections between poetry and visual arts or poetry and music, as well as staged readings of verse drama. “A sister doesn’t mean separate, a sister art means often there are possibilities for collaboration,” Kirchwey explains.
Kirchwey pursues one such avenue for collaboration through writing ekphrastic poetry, which the Poetry Foundation defines as “a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.” The Foundation explains that “through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” As such, ekphrasis strengthens the interwovenness of the arts. Through the Poet-Artist Book Project, co-sponsored with the College of Fine Arts, Kirchwey helps students in BU’s MFA creative writing program work with first-year MFA visual artists to fashion a “book”– images and texts– that may take many forms. An example hangs proudly in Kirchwey’s office, where a shower curtain is transformed into a landscape of poetry and paint.
After ten years as the Director of the Creative Writing program at Bryn Mawr College, Kirchwey returned to arts administration. He served as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, a privately funded research and study center for American scholars and artists, from 2010-2013. Kirchwey had previously been a Rome Prize Fellow in Literature from 1994-1995. “My job there as the arts director… was to come up with public literary programs for the American Academy,” Kirchwey explains. As the first writer to hold this position, Kirchwey curated translation events that looked at translating poetry from Italian and Polish into English as a way to share poetry with larger global audiences.
As a writer, Kirchwey at times focuses on “the juxtapositions of antiquity with the contemporary world.” These ideas are prevalent throughout his work as a professor in the MFA Creative Writing program, where he teaches courses about Ancient Greek tragedy in contemporary work and a newer English Department course focused on the poetry of war throughout history. He has also taught the Translation Seminar twice as part of the Literary Translation MFA program, an experience that strengthened his belief in the exchange of information between languages: “As a poet writing in English, it is supremely important to have a perspective on the English language, and what that language can do,” Kirchwey explains. To achieve this, according to Kirchwey, one must also understand what other languages can do.
During the translation events at the American Academy, Kirchwey was introduced to and took an interest in the works of Italian poet Giovanni Giudici (1924-2011). Although Giudici passed away a year before Kirchwey curated the translation program, his influence on Kirchwey’s life has been substantial. “One poem of his really knocked my socks off,” says Kirchwey, “this got me started on a translation project that lasted from 2012 to [2025].” This translation, titled More Honor in Betrayal: the Selected Poems of Giovanni Giudici, will be the first book-length selection of Giudici’s poems to be translated into English and also Kirchwey’s first substantial Italian translation. The collection is set to be published later this year.
Two other pieces of Kirchwey’s work are set to be released in 2027. Kirchwey’s eighth book of poems entitled Good Apothecary, is a culmination of ten years of work, and most of the poems collected in it have been published separately in magazines over the years. The book covers the period of his son’s medical school education and residency, and includes poems about the body, illness, and healing. Kirchwey describes the collection as “intended to be a survey of sickness and healing… on both a personal level and a societal level, chronicling the COVID pandemic as well as the #MeToo and BLM movements.”
Kirchwey’s third project, set to be published in Spring 2027, is called Who Rides the Flame: A Family History of Wartime Loss. The work is a memoir that incorporates prose, poems, historical sources, and family correspondence, centered around a personal tragedy during World War II, in which Kirchwey’s uncle served as a Navy pilot and was shot down and killed near Saipan in the Pacific Ocean. Similarly to the work in Good Apothecary, most of the book has appeared in magazines and journals, in this case as essays, each thinking about the life, death and afterlife of Kirchwey’s uncle from a different literary perspective and starting point. The book dives into the concept of ambiguous loss and unresolved grief that occurs when you’re left with no body to mourn. Writing the memoir has helped Kirchwey understand his uncle’s life and the consequences his death has had on further generations. “We all have things that we need to figure out in our lives, and poets do it by staring at a piece of paper,” says Kirchwey.
Since he joined the Creative Writing Program faculty in 2014, interactions with BU students have added to family history, years abroad, and public-facing arts administration as experiences that impact Kirchwey’s writing. “There’s no question that [my students] help me look at my own work differently and also see new possibilities,” Kirchwey explains. Kirchwey does not take these experiences lightly, combining lessons he’s learned in and out of the classroom to create in the most authentic way he can.