Born in New York City, Jascha Kessler (Ph.D., Litt.D.) has received varied research grants, prizes, and writing fellowships since 1952 when he won a Major Hopwood Award for Poetry (University of Michigan). They include the NEA Fellowship in Writing, two Senior Fulbright Awards to Italy and one to Czechoslovakia. Since 1961, he has been a Professor of English & Modern Literature at UCLA, also teaching poetry, fiction, and playwrighting. In 1979, Mr. Kessler was a Rockefeller Fellow and worked at the Bellagio Study Center, completing his translation (with Amin Banani) of the Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad: Bride of Acacias: The Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad (Caravan Books, Delmar, NY: 1983). He won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction Writing for 1993-1994.

He reviewed fiction and poetry weekly, theater and events on the air for KUSC-FM (Los Angeles) for 5 years in the 1980s; several dozen of his reviews, both broadcast and published in magazines and papers since the 1960s, have been anthologized in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale Research) over the decades. His literary essays have appeared widely. He also served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica, California, from 1990-1996.

Kessler has published five collections of fiction. An Egyptian Bondage, & Other Stories (Harper & Row, NY: 1967), Death Comes for the Behaviorist: 4 Long Stories (Lexis Press, San Francisco, CA: 1983), Classical Illusions: 28 Stories (McPherson & Co.: Kingston, NY, 1985), and Transmigrations: 18 Mythologems (Jazz Press: Capitola, CA: 1985). His latest collection, Siren Songs & Classical Illusions: 50 Stories, was published by McPherson & Co., in December of 1992. Also a novel, Rapid Transit 1948: An Unsentimental Education (Xlibris 1999). Second edition of An Egyptian Bondage (rev.) (Xlibris 1999).

He has also published three volumes of poetry: Whatever Love Declares (The Plantin Press: Los Angeles, CA: 1969; After The Armies Have Passed (NYU Press: NY: 1970), and, In Memory Of The Future (Kayak Press, Santa Cruz, CA: 1976). Collected Poems (Xlibris 1998).

In 1979, he became the first American writer to be honored with the Hungarian PEN Club’s Memorial Medal for his various collaborative translation projects in fiction and verse: The Magician’s Garden: 24 Stories by Geza Csáth, with Charlotte Rogers (Columbia University Press, NY: 1980), which also won the Translation Prize from the Translation Center at Columbia University, and was republished in the Writers From the Other Europe Series, edited by Philip Roth, as Opium (Penguin Books: NY, 1983). Also in 1983, Rose of Mother-of-Pearl appeared, a s fairy tale translated from the Serbian with the author, Grozdana Olujic, Illustrated by Kathy Jacobi (Hot Chocolate Books, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN). Under Gemini: The Selected Poetry of Miklós Radnóti, with Maria Körösy (Ohio University Press: Athens, OH) appeared in 1985. And he published a large translation project: The Face Of Creation: 23 Contemporary Hungarian Poets (Coffee House Press, 1988, Minneapolis, MN), in collaboration with Julia Kada, Maria Körösy, et al.. He has also published a volume of poetry translated from the Bulgarian, Medusa: The Selected Poetry of Nicolai Kantchev, with Alexander Shurbanov (Quarterly Review of Literature Press, 1986, Princeton, NJ ). In 1989, he won the Translation Center’s George Soros Foundation Prize for a volume of poems from the Hungarian of Sándor Rákos, Catullan Games, Introduction by the Translator, Illustration by Richard Diebenkorn (The Marlboro Press, December 1989, Marlboro, VT). His translation of Sophocles' King Oedipus, with an extensive essary as Translator’s Preface, was published by The University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia. December, 1998.)

Kessler has written several plays (produced in New York and Los Angeles) and The Anniversary, a libretto for a full-length opera with a score by Ned Rorem. Christmas Carols & Other Plays (Xlibris 1999).