About

Kelly is a creator and educator. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire where she was a teaching fellow and awarded the Young Dawkins III Prize in Creative Writing. She worked with Dawnland Voices 2.0, an online literary magazine for Indigenous writers of New England, and was the Arts Editor for Barnstorm Literary Journal. After graduation, Kelly taught at a variety of schools such as the University of New Hampshire, St. Paul’s School, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and Grubstreet, a Boston-based nonprofit writing center. During that time, she worked with professors and writers on their manuscripts including consulting and editing essays in Morrison’s Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision.

She was recently Head of Faculty at US Performance Academy, an online middle and high school for high-performing athletes, and is now a Guide at Khan World School, where in partnership with Khan Academy and ASU Prep Academy she is designing curriculum and teaching in an online, mastery based model for high school honors students.

Her fiction often focuses on working class people with themes of grief, roots, identity, and motherhood. Kelly’s work can be found in Well-Schooled, Flash Fiction Magazine, Litro, and she was a finalist for the Charles Johnson Fiction Award with Crab Orchard Review. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and daughter, where they all make art, music, and create together. Kelly is currently working on her first novel.