Edmund Leroy Keeley, author, translator, educator, critic, and administrator, was born in Damascus, Syria, on February 5, 1928. When he was three, his family moved to Canada for five years. He lived in Greece from ages 8 to 11, receiving his primary education in Thessaloniki. After attending high school and college in the U.S., Keeley was a Fulbright Scholar and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and went on to receive a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from Oxford University in 1952.

In 1954, he began teaching at Princeton University, where he became a full professor of English and creative writing, continuing in that capacity until his retirement in 1993. During his career at Princeton, Keeley held directorships in the Creative Arts Program, the Creative Writing and Theatre Program, and the Creative Writing Program. Keeley also held various offices outside of Princeton's walls. He served as president of the Modern Greek Studies Association, vice-president of the Poetry Society of America, and president of PEN American Center.

Keeley has written six novels, fourteen volumes of poetry in translation, and five volumes of nonfiction. His first novel, The Libation, won him the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and an honorable mention in the New Jersey Author's Award the following year. His translation in Six Poets of Modern Greece, which he edited with Philip Sherrard, won the Guiness Poetry Award in 1962. Keeley captured the New Jersey Author's Award two more times: in 1968 for George Seferis: Collected Poems, 1924-1955, and for his third novel, The Impostor, in 1970. In 1973, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow for the second time, having received his first Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in Fiction in 1959. C. P. Cavafy: Selected Poems was nominated for a National Book Award in Translation, also in 1973.