The University of Illinois Creative Writing Program reported on Thursday that one of its faculty members, the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, passed away. No cause was given. The program shared the news on its Facebook page: “It is with great sadness that we share this news: our colleague Brigit Pegeen Kelly has recently passed away. Brigit was a very private person, so out of respect for her memory, as well as the wishes of her family, we won’t be sharing further details at this time.”

Kelly was the author of three books of poetry, To the Place of Trumpets (1987), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; Song (1995), named the Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets; and The Orchard (2004), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Carl Phillips said of her work, “Her poems are like no one else’s—hard and luminous, weird in the sense of making a thing strange, that we at last might see it, poems that from book to book show a strength that flexes itself both formally and in terms of content, in ways that continue to, at equal turns, teach and surprise.”

Kelly was lauded for her work many times. In 2008, she was a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Whiting Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Stephen Dobyns has said, “Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of the very best poets now writing in the United States. In fact, there is no one who is any better. Not only are her poems brilliantly made, but they also give great pleasure. Rarely are those two qualities seen together in one poet.”