Biography
Rachel Kellum left the flatlands of central Illinois in 1993 to head for her hummingbird-loving grandmother’s Colorado mountains. Ironically, she now lives on Colorado’s eastern plains where clouds have curiously become her mountains, and mountains have become her clouds.
As a college instructor of creative writing, composition, literature, humanities, painting and art history/appreciation (usually five of these at once!), her passion is to inspire people of all ages to live artfully. She is an active member of Morgan Community College’s Center for Arts and Community Enrichment, dedicated to bringing the visual, literary and performing arts to Morgan County. She also leads a summer poetry-writing workshop for Wiggins’ middle school children.
Kellum holds a BFA in painting and drawing from Millikin University and an MA in English Education from Colorado State University. Her thesis, Composing Birth, explores an emerging genre of women’s creative non-fiction: homegrown birth narratives that challenge the technocratic storylines of modern obstetrics. To this end, she offers her own birth stories that are found online and in the book, Journey into Motherhood: Inspirational Stories of Natural Birth.
An occasional actor/performer, Kellum played Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and has performed original work in The Vagina Monologues and The Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival.
Primarily a poet, Kellum’s work is featured in various online venues—Barnwood International Poetry Magazine, Blood Lotus, Slow Trains and others— and also on her poetry blog, wordweeds.com. One of her poems was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008. For more information, visit www.wordweedscom.
