Keelan, who was born in Anaheim, California, is a graduate of Humboldt State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Missing Her (New Issues Press, 2009), and has published poems widely in magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review, Smartish Pace, Electronic Poetry Review, Conduit, Pequod, American Letters & Commentary, and Jacket Magazine. She has published poems and essays in anthologies including The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2009).

She directs the MFA program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and serves as the editor of Interim, the university's annual literary review. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband, the poet Donald Revell, and their children. Keelan has also served as a judge for two of the most prestigious poetry prizes, the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize (2009, winner Laura McKee) and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize (2010, winner Dean Rader).

Full-Length Poetry Collections

• Missing Her (New Issues Press, 2009)
• The Devotion Field (Alice James Books, 2005 - Finalist, 2005 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry)
• Utopic (Alice James Books, 2000 Beatrice Hawley Award)
• The Secularist (University of Georgia, 1997 - Contemporary Poetry Series winner)
• Refinery (Cleveland State University 1994 - Cleveland State University Poetry Prize winner)

Chapbooks

• Of and among there was a locus(t) (Ahsahta Press, 2003)