[1] He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1972, with a B.A.

Other stories have won the Asimov's Reader Poll and the SF Chronicle Award.

As of 2020[update] he is retired from the faculty for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine.

He has had a story in the June issue of Asimov's for the past twenty years.

Through these anthologies, Kelly and Kessel have brought together a wide spectrum of both traditional genre authors and authors who are considered to be more mainstream, including Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon and Steven Millhauser.