Claudia Keelan, UNLV professor of English and director of UNLV's nationally recognized creative writing program, received the 2008 Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review (APR) for her poem "Everybody's Autobiography."

The poem, which was published in the January 2007 issue of APR, is both an elegy for her father and an attempt to understand the historical reality of America's fuel consumption.

"I was trying to spend time with my father in an essay by researching his life via events that took place in the year of his birth," wrote Keelan in the APR. "The essay became a poem when it collided with my father's life in oil later in the century, and with my childhood spent largely, as most Californians, in the car. An essay became a poem because my intentions were ignored, and what could be said about my absent father must be said about the condition of being human, must be said about everybody."

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Keelan is the author of five books of poetry, including "Refinery," "The Secularist," "Utopic," "The Devotion Field," and the letterpress chapbook "Of & Among There Was a Locus(t)." She also serves as the editor of Interim, UNLV's annual literary review. The Shestack prize is awarded annually to poets whose work has appeared in the "American Poetry Review" during the preceding calendar year. She shares the 2008 award with University of California, Berkeley professor and poet Robert Hass.

Past winners of the prize include such famous poets as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Jorie Graham, and Denise Levertov, among others.