Kerry Shawn Keys (born June 25, 1946 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) is an American poet, writer, playwright and translator.
In 1964, Keys attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on several scholarships given partly as a result of a new "quota" system the Ivy League institution was using to recruit "Colored folk" and the economically disadvantaged.
He took a leave-of-absence after his sophomore year (1968) and joined the Peace Corps for a two-year stint as an agricultural assistant in the south of India in the town of Devarakonda near Hyderabad.
And at this time the seeds were planted for his polyphonic epic poem, "A Gathering of Smoke", first published by P. Lal in Calcutta, and later by Three Continents Press in Washington, D.C., in 1986.
During those final two years, Keys was influenced by reading English-language poets particularly Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and especially Pound's Cantos.
Other major influences at this formative time were Joyce, Jung, Pablo Neruda, Whitehead, Nagarjuna, Thoreau, Chuang-Tzu, and Bachelard and Husserl.
He began to read poets of the 1950s and 1960s, many in the anthology Naked Poetry, and in Robert Bly's literary journal, The Fifties and The Sixties.
He also organized and edited a bilingual anthology of contemporary North American poetry, Quingumbo, published in São Paulo.
They covered a variety of themes including: India, Brazil, the Tao Te Ching, flamenco, Central America and the Pennsylvania hill country.
Like Auden and other prolific poets, Keys writes songs, light verse, limericks, pithy satiric squibs, erotica;, ideograms, haiku, epigrams, parodies, and enigmatic epiphanies and riddles.
From the early 70s to the mid-90s Keys' relationship with the artist and flamenco guitarist, Frank Rush Miller (Paco de Nada) was important.
They were close colleagues and friends, lived together for a while, and on occasion performed in tandem in Pennsylvania, Spain, Central America, and Brazil.
Keys divorced again in the mid-1980s and then lived for some half-dozen years with the singer-songwriter, and textile artist, Janet Pellam "invented" a method of binding Pine Press books using a Singer sewing machine with the poet.
With no health insurance and a severe injury to his leg and back while felling trees, Keys began toying with idea of a move to Europe.
Younger Lithuanians were introduced to books by Tomaž Šalamun, Charles Bukowski, Vytautas Blože, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Michael Jennings, Brian Young, Bill Shields, J. C. Todd, Craig Czury, Hailji, and others.
From 1998 to the present, Keys has lived for the most part in Vilnius, publishing, editing, translating from Lithuanian and Portuguese, and writing poetry, plays, children's books, and wonderscripts.
Keys' chapbook and book translations of Lithuanian poets include works by: Eugenijus Ališanka, Sonata Paliulytė, Jonas Jackevičius, Sigitas Geda, Laurynas Katkus, and others.
Recently he performed as Biblical Chronicler and Speaker in Tarasov's and Frido Mann's multimedia project, The Flood, and has also ventured into voicing an interactive audio-e book for children, Strawberry Day, by Kestutis Kasparavičius.