KIM
ROBERTS
is the editor of Beltway
Poetry Quarterly and the anthology Full Moon On K. Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010). She is the author of three books of poems, Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), The
Kimnama (Vrzhu
Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers
Publishing House, 1994), and the nonfiction chapbook Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word in DC (Beltway Editions, 2010). Roberts 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), 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 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: "Wide Enough for Our Ambition," a tour of DC's segregated public schools (2010), "New Deal Washington" tour
of Foggy Bottom and Downtown (2009), "Jazz Age Stories of
the Rich and Scandalous" tour of Dupont Circle (2008), and
"Zora Neale Hurston's Washington" tour of Seventh and
U Streets (2007). She developed a tour of the greater U Street
neighborhood called "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in DC,"
first 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."
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 winner of the 2010 Washington On-Line Award for contributions to the Washington, DC arts community and 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.