Richard Kenney is the author of four books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, and The One Strand River. His first book was chosen as part of the Yale Younger Poets Series, and he is a MacArthur ("genius grant") Fellow.  He teaches poetry and verse writing in the Undergraduate and MFA Programs at the University of Washington. He has taught the early Fall Friday Harbor Poetry Seminar since 2008, and has also been the director of the UW English Department Creative Writing in Rome Program for over ten years. His work is informed by science. He's interested in Celtic and classical literatures. He thinks about human evolution and language origins, the cognitive basis of poetic forms, magical reasoning, and the Darwinian lives of subliterary species such as jokes, riddles, proverbs, charms, spells, nursery rhymes and weather-saws. Among his favorite poets are Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Auden, Frost, Larkin, Merrill. Absent the Mediterranean, he lives with his family in Port Townsend, WA.