Kirk Robertson, a native of Los Angeles, was a poet, essayist, publisher, editor, and artist. He lived in Nevada since 1975. His writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. He received the Water Mark Breakthrough Award in 1985 for his book of illustrations, Ar*ti*facts.
Robertson was the founder, editor, and publisher of Scree magazine and Duck Down Press in Fallon, Nevada. He was involved with the Churchill County Arts Program, the Nevada State Council on the Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and was an editor of neon, the art journal of the Nevada State Council on the Arts. His work is best described by his colleague and friend, William Fox, as following "the tradition of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, the stresses of American life and language inextricably linked in a spare, unforgiving cadence...at their best his poems, won through years of painful life and thought and craft, take the heart out of you and offer it up to the clean desert sky."