Keri Pickett

Keri Pickett: Author of Love in the 90s, BB & Jo: The Story of a Lifelong Love, A Granddaughter’s Portrait (Warner Books, 1995) had a first printing of 150,000 copies. Faeries (Aperture Books, 2000) won the Lambda Literary Award for best art book of 2000 and Saving Body & Soul, The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland (Random House, 2004) Photographs by Keri Pickett. Essays & Interviews by Margaret Nelson helped raise money for the homeless shelter it features.

In 1983 Fred McDarrah gave me an internship at the Village Voice Newspaper in NYC. I left NYC and went home to MN due to a diagnosis of Burkitt’s lymphoma cancer. During my two years of chemotherapy I did create my first book which paired images of my grandparents in their mid 90’s with their year long postal courtship from the late 1920s. That book had a printing of 150,000 copies; Love in the 90s, BB and Jo, The Story of a Lifelong Love, a Granddaughter’s Portrait.

My second book Faeries is about a retreat place in the north woods for a group of gay men who identify as being radical faeries.

I first photographed Mary Jo Copeland on a People magazine assignment. Margaret Nelson and I decided to report further resulting in Saving Body & Soul, The Mission of Mary Jo Copeland.

I have been awarded fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight, Jerome and Target Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.

My pictures have appeared in Life, Time and People magazines as well as Stern and Geo.