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 All of this had to start somewhere… In Kelley’s case it started early – he wrote poetry at age 10, attempted science fiction at 13, and wrote a book-length work of fiction, thinly autobiographical, called Three Preludes, while still a senior in high school. “My mother had a highly-developed verbal sense, possibly stemming from her Irish genes, and obviously I inherited it from her,” Kelley said. “She had a large vocabulary, and by the time I was ten, mine was already at the college level, which unfortunately caused me to be shuffled into various ‘enrichment’ classes at school where I didn’t have much fun.” But the love for writing stayed with him. After graduating from San Diego State University in 1977 with a degree in journalism and history, Kelley began a career as a newspaper reporter covering business, government, healthcare and education issues in southern and central California. A two-part series he wrote for a newspaper concerning claims by the religious right that secular humanism was being taught as a religion in public schools earned him an award from the California School Boards Association in 1982. The following year, Kelley switched media and turned to broadcast journalism, spending the next two years as a radio reporter and newscaster at KUIC-FM in Solano County, California. In 1985, itching to see the world, he joined the U.S. Department of State as a telecommunications specialist and spent most of the next dozen years overseas, serving in Europe, South America, west Africa and Russia as well as Washington, D.C. His experiences included a canoe trip down the piranha-infested Paraguay river in Brazil’s Pantanal; shopping in the African bazaars outside Abidjan; a near-coup in Moscow in 1993 (about which he wrote an article for the State Department’s in-house magazine); the Oktoberfest in Munich; visits to Ernest Hemingway’s old apartment in Paris and Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrook House” in Luebeck; a corrida in Barcelona and Die Fledermaus at the Vienna State Opera on New Year’s Day. “I wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world,” he said.
In 2002 he received certification from Lado College International in Washington, D.C. as a teacher of English as a Second Language, after having worked as a short time as writer and editor for the Chairman of the Board of a local investment banking firm. Soon he found himself back on his home turf in southern California, where in addition to caring for his aging father, he went to work as full-time staff reporter on the Chula Vista Star-News, a weekly newspaper with roughly 30,000 circulation in southern San Diego County. He received an Excellence in Journalism award for investigative reporting from the San Diego Press Club in 2004. Now on the east coast again, he accepts freelance assignments. |
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| © 2005 Kelley Dupuis | kelley@kelleydupuis.com |