Johanna Keller
IMA Graduate, 1996
Hometown:
New York, NY
Johanna Keller is the Founding Director of the
Goldring Arts Journalism Program at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications and teaches magazine journalism. The Goldring program is
the first master’s program to train journalists to write about the
arts, including architecture, film, fine arts, music and theater
and includes an individually tailored curriculum of courses in
journalism and in the arts.
Keller writes about music and literature for The New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, London Evening Standard, and for the magazines Opera News,
Symphony, Musical America, Strad and other magazines in the U.S. and the
U.K. For her essays in The New York Times, she received the 2000 ASCAP-Deems
Taylor Award and the 2001 Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of
New York. She has been a 2002 USC Annenberg Getty Fellow in Los Angeles
and a 2000 Journalism Fellow at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada.
From 1997-2001, Keller was editor of Chamber
Music magazine and during her tenure the publication received its first
six national awards for excellence in editorial and design. In 2000,
the magazine was even acclaimed in the Wall Street Journal: "Chamber
Music magazine has been dramatically spruced up since Ms. Keller took
the helm in 1997, not just in appearance, but in content and profile.
After a five year hiatus, it returned to the newsstands in 1999, its
coverage expanded to include a regular column on jazz."
In 2001, CavanKerry Press published Carolyn
Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, co-edited by Johanna Keller
with Annie Finch and Candace McClellan. The collection of essays, interviews,
and poems pays tribute to the California poet in her 75th year and includes
an introduction by Maxine Kumin. The book was called “riveting reading” by
The Seattle Times.
Keller is also a poet and her long poem, The
Skull, was published in 1998 by The Press at Colorado College in a limited
edition with photographs by the author. Irish poet Eavan Boland selected
the poem as a finalist for the 1996 Randall Jarrell Prize and wrote: "Her
work seeks out the correlatives between the private and public with
ruthless honesty. Its vocabulary, ranging from descriptive to singing
rhetoric, is beautifully managed."
Johanna Keller’s poems have appeared in
Southwest Review, Chelsea, Rattapallax, Barrow Street, Pivot, Nimrod,
Sewanee Theological Review, Connecticut Review, and in journals in England
and Israel. She received the annual Editor's Prize from The Florida
Review, an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts
(NYSCA), and an Artist Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
Johanna Keller lived in Manhattan for 25 years and taught writing at
Eugene Lang College at The New School University in Manhattan, The Writers
Voice, The Newport Writers Conference, Northern Westchester Center for
the Arts, and elsewhere. She was elected a member of the board of directors
of the Music Critics Association of North America and a member of PEN
America.
