• 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic Drama for Airedales & Cipher
• Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America), for A Wandering Island
• Ingram Merrill Foundation grant
• 1994 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant
• National Endowment for the Arts
• 1994-95 Rome Prize in Literature

Poetry

• "Fireflys", Slate, July 12, 2005
• "The Tragic Sense of Life", Slate, Dec. 9, 1998
• "Three oaks", The New Criterion, November 2006

Verse Play

• Airedales & Cipher, based on the Alcestis of Euripides,

Anthologies

• The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000)
• Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry: a Bilingual Anthology (1996)
• Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996)
• After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995).

A sonogram -- that routine magic whereby a mother's womb turns into a crystal ball -- opens Karl Kirchwey's elegant third collection of poems, The Engrafted Word.