Diane Kendig biography

Diane Kendig Biography

"Writing poetry is a way of life,
not a career."

--Marvin Bell

Diane Kendig has worked for over twenty-five years as a poet and writer, translator, and teacher. She was born and raised in Canton, Ohio in a house her father Russ Kendig built himself when he came home from WWII and her parents still live in today. He married Gladys May Young, and they had four children, of whom Diane is the oldest. Diane was educated in the public schools before going off to Otterbein College and then graduate school at Cleveland State University. One of the two big influences in her early years of writing remains her family and its community, which included her neighborhood, schools, and church. Second, she was fortunate to spend her twenties in Cleveland, with its expansive poetry performing and publishing scene, where writers from many classes, races, and professions collaborated in readings, workshops, and conferences. Of those years she says, "The free monthly CSU Poetry Forum was my MFA." She was thrilled to go back to Cleveland in 2006 to see one of her poems as part of a permanent art installation designed by Koryn Rostad at the Cleveland State College of Business. Since then, Diane has lived and worked other places in Ohio and in Santa Cruz, CA, Rochester, NY, Managua, Nicaragua, and currently, Massachusetts.

Her poetry has been published in two chapbooks, A Tunnel of Flute Song (Cleveland State Poetry Center) and Diane Kendig’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House) as well as over fifty journals, including Colere, Minnesota Review, Poetry Midwest, Slant, and Poemeleon, and anthologies such as Grrr: A Collection of Poems About Bears, Modern Poems of Ohio, and Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. She has been the recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowships in Poetry and a Yaddo Fellowship. In addition to poetry, she has published creative nonfiction and fiction in journals and anthologies such as Ariadne’s Thread: A Collection of Contemporary Women’s Journals, From the Heartlands: Photos and Essays from the Midwest, and Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents.

As a translator, she first published poems from the Nicaraguan poetry workshop movement, including a bilingual chapbook of Nicaraguan poems with photos by Steve Cagan. Titled And a Pencil to Write Your Name: Poems from the Nicaragua Poetry Workshop Movement, the book took Diane to the National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Institute at UC Santa Cruz and to a 1991 Fulbright Lectureship in the Translation Department of Central American University in Nicaragua. Since then, she has translated poems by among other Nicaraguan poets, Daisy Zamora, who translated Diane's work for the literary supplement of Nuevo Diario. Diane returned to Managua with other American writers in 1996 to run poetry workshops for children and for teens in neighborhood centers and for inmatesin the maximum security prison, La Modelo.

From 1984 to 2002, she was a member of the English Department at The University of Findlay in Findlay, Ohio, where she developed the department’s creative writing emphasis and its visiting writers series. In addition to courses in composition, creative writing, and teacher training, she developed a literature course in Ohio Writers, a career course for English Majors, and two advanced courses in poetics and rhetoric to be delivered both face to face and online. During her tenure at UF, she participated in the university's prison education program, teaching often Lima Correctional Institution. She was active in the National Council of Teachers of English, where she served as Chair of the Poetry Board for College Composition and Communication. Her continued academic presentations and articles have focused on pedagogy, especially the pedagogy of teaching creative writing in prison and in on contemporary poetry. Most recently, she has been studying how the internet has affected poetry and how poetry has been affecting the internet. As a part of this study, she has continued to develop her ourses in E-Poetics and E-Rhetoric.

In 1980 out of an abiding belief in public poetry workshops, Diane joined the Ohio Arts Council Artists in Residence program, where she remains as a Visiting Writer. From this post, she has taught creative writing to students in grades K through 12 and to their teachers. Because of her work with children and in collaboration with jazz musician Jack Taylor, she wrote a children’s musical, Talk to the Moon, which was produced by the local children’s theater in 1998. She also led a writers workshop for inmates at the Lima Correctional Institution from 1985-2002. She considers that workshop to be a defining experience of her middle age, and its participants have performed and published nationally and won many awards, including two national Pen Prisoners Writing Awards. Since moving to the East Coast in 2002, she has been teaching writing at Bentley College and doing public creative writing residencies in a national park, schools, and colleges.

She currently resides in Lynn, Massachusetts with her husband Paul Jude Beauvais and their packmate, Robbie Burns Beaudig. a wheaten-colored Scottish Terrier.