Keely Bowers

Keely Brooke Bowers is a writer, teacher, mother, gardener, and a lover of music, science, poetry, the outdoors, and long road trips. She has taught many courses in many places, such as Creative Writing, Fiction Writing, Workshops and Seminars in Composition, Engineering Composition, Writing in the Sciences, Public Speaking, Special Topics in Fiction, and Developmental Reading and Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, Community College of Allegheny County, and La Roche University.

She has served as a Writing Consultant in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and in the Writing Center, where she has been known to leap from a student’s analysis of Elie Wiesel’s Night to a poem about a baton twirler to a pharmacy school applicant’s personal statement to an engineering lab report investigation of a double-pipe heat exchanger in nearly seconds flat, like some kind of word acrobat. (It’s like this sometimes in the Writing Center—stop in and visit.)

She loves her students and the discoveries writing leads to. She’s interested in collage and juxtaposition, in connections between seemingly unconnected things, and in the creative, generative power of words to bring things into being on the page. Her work has appeared in such places as Dickinson Review, Crazyhorse, Creative Nonfiction, and Carve. She was a finalist for the New Rivers Press Writing Award, and she won the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction.