About

Kendall Dunkelberg is a poet and teacher who lives with Kim in their 133-year-old house, where he enjoys letting wildflowers grow in the yard and watching the migrations of birds.

He directs the Creative Writing low-residency MFA and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women, where he is also Chair of the Dept. of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy and Professor of English, teaching Creative Writing, World Literature, and Twentieth-Century Poetry.

His fourth collection of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, was published in May 2025 by Fernwood Press. His other collections incude Barrier Island Suite (2016 Texas Review Press), Time Capsules,(2009 Texas Review Press), and Landscapes and Architectures, (2001 Florida Literary Foundation Press). He is also the author of the textbook: A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing, now published by Bloomsbury, for whom he is writing a revised and expanded second edition.

Dunkelberg was born and raised in Osage, Iowa. Prior to moving to Mississippi, he has lived in Galesburg and Chicago, Illinois; Ghent and Leuven, Belgium; Northfield, Minnesota; and Austin, Texas. He earned his BA in English / Creative Writing from Knox College, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. A selection from his dissertation, a translation of the collected poems of the Belgian poet, Paul Snoek, was published by Green Integer Press in 2000 as Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus.

He is editor of Poetry South and helps with the MFA program’s literary magazine Ponder Review. He has published poems and translations widely in literary magazines, including guest editing and translating for a special issue of The Literary Review, Outside the Lines: Recent Dutch and Flemish Writing in 1997, and poems and translations in magazines such as: China Grove, Poetry South, Valley Voices, Modern Poetry in Translation, Visions International, Five Fingers, Two Lines, Osiris, Slipstream, Birmingham Poetry Review, Poetry Southeast, New Southerner, Texas Review, Big Muddy, Pemmican, Pilgrimage, Mountain Gazette, and Tar River Poetry. His translations also appear on the websites Lyrikline and Poetry International. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2016-17.