ABOUT CAROL
Carol Keeley has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, New England Review, Arts & Letters, Oxford Poetry, Antioch Review, Chicago Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere.
For fiction, Keeley won the 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award from The Masters Review and was a finalist for 2017 Nelson Algren Award. For nonfiction, Keeley won first place for memoir/essay in Writer’s Digest 2025 Competition, and third place for The Plentitudes 2026 Nonfiction Prize. She was awarded the Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 2019.
She has taught writing workshops at Columbia College and the University of Colorado. She currently teaches at Naropa University.
NEWS & AWARDS
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Winner of The Masters Review 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers, "Wind and Embers"
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Winner of The Plentitudes 2026 Nonfiction Prize, Third Place, "Nonjudgment Day"
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Winner of the 2025 Writer's Digest Annual Competition for Memoir/Personal Essay,
"The Dead Whale" -
Published “Murmurations,” Ploughshares, Winter 2023-24
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Finalist in the 2020 CRAFT Elements contest
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Semifinalist in the 2020 Sewanee Review Nonfiction contest, judged by Melissa Febos
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Winner of the 2019 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, Arts & Letters for "Demon Feeding"
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Finalist in the 2017 Nelson Algren Literary Award Competition for "Errata"
"'Demon Feeding’ [by Carol Keeley] does at least three things really well at one time. It raises our consciousness about PTSD among veterans and the personal hell our government’s decisions create in them; it has a compelling understory and a character we care about—the narrator—who is fighting demons of her own; and it braids those two really seamlessly, using plenty of sensory detail to keep us engaged and even giving us a moment of happiness amidst all the sad spoils of a difficult world. It’s a beautifully made and important essay.”
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- Pam Houston, judge of the Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction
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