KIM
ROBERTS
is the editor of Beltway
Poetry Quarterly and author of two books of poems, The
Kimnama (Vrzhu
Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers
Publishing House, 1994). She has been featured in numerous anthologies,
including Letters to the World (Red Hen Press), American
Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press),
The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (No Tell Books), Cabin
Fever (The Word Works), Poetic Voices Without Borders
(Gival Press), DC Poets Against the War (Argonne Hotel),
Hungry As We Are (Washington Writers Publishing House), and
The First Yes: Poems About Communicating (Dryad Press). She
has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as
well as in Canada, Ireland, France, Brazil, and New Zealand. Her
poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and
Mandarin.
Poems by Ms.
Roberts have been set to music by an alternative rock band, Arc
of Ones, and by classical composer Daron Hagen, and several have
been choreographed by Jane Franklin Dance Company. Five of her plays
have been produced or published.
Roberts has done
extensive research on writers with ties to Washington, DC. Her popular
walking tours are an annual feature of The Big Read DC, a program
sponsored by the Humanities Council of Washington each Spring. Her
Big Read DC tours include: "New Deal Washington" tour
of Foggy Bottom and Downtown in 2009, "Jazz Age Stories of
the Rich and Scandalous" tour of Dupont Circle in 2008, and
"Zora Neale Hurston's Washington" tour of Seventh and
U Streets in 2007. She developed a tour of the greater U Street
neighborhood called "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in DC,"
presented at the Split This Rock Festival: Poems of Provocation
and Witness in March 2008. Her research on Walt Whitmans ten
years as a resident of Washington, DC has been published in The
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, as well as being featured in
articles in The Washington Post and The Washington Times,
on radio programs on WAMU and WFPW, and in panel presentations at
Rutgers University, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
and at the annual Washington Historical Studies Conference. She
was the Coordinator of a city-wide festival in 2005, "DC Celebrates
Whitman: 150 Years of Leaves of Grass."
Ms. Roberts is
the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington.
She was awarded a 2008 Independent Voice Award from the Capital
BookFest. She has been a writer-in-residence at twelve artist colonies:
the Hambidge Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Helene Wurlitzer
Foundation, Mesa Refuge, Ucross Foundation, Ragdale Foundation,
New York Mills Arts Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,
Hidden River Arts Retreat, Artists Enclave at I-Park, Blue
Mountain Center, and Millay Colony for the Arts.