The association holds an annual membership meeting in May, followed by a meeting of its Board of Directors. A second meeting of the directors is customarily held in New York City on the last Friday of January during what is commonly denoted as “Book Week.” From its inception the association has been governed by this Board of Directors, who are elected to staggered three-year terms at the annual membership meeting. Composition of the current Board numbers 18: nine of these hold professorial positions in English Departments; two are librarians; one is a research scholar with the Shelley and his Circle Collection of the New York Public Library; three (two of whom hold PhDs in English, with specialties in Romanticism) are associated with the finance industry; one is a lawyer, one a doctor, and one a media consultant.
The Board has historically attempted to mirror the various authorial, bibliophile, and scholarly interests that come together under the broad umbrella overarching the circles and, as this enumeration indicates, to include as well expertise in various possible imperatives of its governance. There are four officers: a President, who oversees the larger interests of the association, including its connections to the British KSMA and to the Rome House; a Vice-President, who serves as general sounding-board and, more recently, as academic liaison, principally with the MLA and its convention; a Secretary, who takes minutes of the meetings and sees that they are published as a legal record in the Keats-Shelley Journal; and a Treasurer who looks after both the membership lists and the financial well-being of the association. In addition, oversight of the K-SJ is triangulated among the editor, a book-review editor, and a bibliographer. None of the Board or the editorial team are financially remunerated.
The official mailing address of the association is at the Shelley and His Circle Collection of the NYPL. It is incorporated as a non-profit charity in the State of New York.