John R. Keene Jr. (born 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry. John Keene was born and raised in the city of St. Louis, and in Webster Groves, in St. Louis County. He raised Catholic, he attended parochial schools, and graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School. He has an A.B. from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Black Community and Student Theater (C.A.S.T.) and served as co-Circulation Manager and on the Art Board of the Harvard Advocate. He received an M.F.A. from New York University, where he was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. He was a longtime member of the Dark Room Collective, an organization that from 1988 to 1998 celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color, and also is a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem. Formerly associate professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, United States, he is now Distinguished Professor of English, chairs the African American and African Studies department, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Program at Rutgers University-Newark. He has taught at Brown and NYU, and at the Indiana University Writer's Conference. For several years he has served as an editorial board member for the African Poetry Book Fund, which aims to promote contemporary poetry by African poets through a range of projects, including its book series, contests, workshops, seminars, and library-development efforts.