Born in 1951 in Palo Alto, California, Kelly was raised Catholic. Her career as a poet was launched when the acclaimed poet James Merrill selected her manuscript To the Place of Trumpets as the 1987 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Published thereafter as her debut collection, To the Place of Trumpets received a number of favorable reviews including that of Fred Muratori in Library Journal, in which Muratori writes that Kelly "constructs a sort of mythology of the real" in her "strange and uncommon" collection.

Kelly's second book of poems, Song (1995), uses music as a recurring theme and, like her first collection, frequently comments on religion and spirituality. It was also quite successful, winning the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and receiving positive reviews, such as Mary Ann Samyn's in Cross Currents: "Kelly's combination of lyric and narrative, of image-making...