Clinton Booth Seely's lifelong engagement with Bangla literature and language began when he served (1963-'65) at the Barisal Zilla School in the then East Pakistan under the US Peace Corps program, to help improve the school's science curriculum. Now retired, Emeritus Professor Seely taught literary and cultural history as well as the Bangla language at the University of Chicago for 35 years. Besides Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature (first edition: Delhi 2008), his major works include The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal (translation of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem Meghanadavadha Kavya), winner of the "A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation" in 2006, from the Association of Asian Studies, USA; and A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), which was awarded the "Ashoke Kumar Sarkar Ananda Prize" from Kolkata in 1993. In 2009, Professor Seely was made a Fellow of the Bangla Academy, Dhaka. In 2023, he was awarded the "Rabindra-Smriti Puraskar" (Tagore Memorial Award) by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi.