[8] When Kellman returned to Barbados, he took an English undergraduate degree at the University of the West Indies and published two poetry chapbooks, In Depths of Burning Light (1982) and The Broken Sun (1984), which drew praise from Kamau Brathwaite, among others.
[1] He worked as a newspaper reporter, an arts and literature review columnist, and in public relations (first at the Central Bank of Barbados and then at the National Cultural Foundation), before immigrating to the U.S. in 1987.
He has been the longest-serving director of the university's Sandhills Writers Conference & Series which he directed from 1989 to 2015, a period which featured major national and international authors, including Ray Bradbury, Maxine Hong Kingston, Derek Walcott, Edward Albee, Gloria Naylor, and Rick Bragg.
[3][5] He won the 2011 Prime Minister's Award (Barbados) for his poetry manuscript South Eastern Stages which also highlighted his Tuk Verse forms and was published in 2012.
[9] He finds considerable resonances between the Caribbean and the Southern states of the U.S., which feed into his poetry, where blue jays, dogwoods and wisteria rub shoulders with angel fish, sugarcane and coral reefs.