Kirk Robertson

Kirk Robertson is a poet, essayist, publisher, editor, and artist. Robertson was born in 1946 in Los Angeles and moved around the West before settling in Fallon in 1975, where he has resided ever since. Before leaving California, he studied with the well-known California poet Gerald Locklin at California State University, Long Beach. His poetry has roots in both the "plainspoken" tradition of Locklin and his close friend Charles Bukowski, as well as in the more formal and minimal style of Robert Creeley.

Robertson founded Scree magazine and Duckdown Press, which were active in the 1970s and early 1980s. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry including Just Past Labor Day: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1995 (University of Nevada Press), Music: A Suite & 13 Songs (Floating Island Press), and Shoes (Black Rock Press), a collaboration with his wife, Valerie Serpa. He was awarded the Nevada Governor's Arts Award in Literature in 1981 and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1992.

During the 1980s, Robertson served as the program director for the Nevada Arts Council, where he became the editor of its art and literary journal, neon, a publication he continues to edit. Thereafter he became the program director for the Churchill Arts Council. He has written art criticism for Art Week and the Reno News & Review, and the weekly column, "Sounding," for the Lahontan Valley News. As of 2007, he was writing a book of essays about art and artists, as well as a collection of previously uncollected and new poems.

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