Wesley McNair

Wesley McNair is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writers, and in 2006 a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000, fifty of which were awarded across the arts to a selection of "America's finest living artists." Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize; the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal (also awarded to Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, et. al.) for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters"; and two honorary doctoral degrees for literary distinction.  Wesley McNair has twice served on the Nominating Jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and is a two-time recipient of residencies at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy. A recent series aired over affiliates of PBS on Robert Frost for which he wrote the scripts received an Emmy Award. Featured on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and several times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over fifty anthologies and textbooks.

McNair is the author of eight collections of poetry, including six full-length volumes and two limited editions (see titles below).  He is the editor of four anthologies of contemporary Maine writing: The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, The Maine Poets, and Contemporary Maine Fiction (which won the 2006 Independent Publishers Award for the anthology category), and First Person Maine (forthcoming from Down East Books, 2008). His recent collections of verse are Talking in the Dark, Fire, and current volume, The Ghosts of You and Me, published in 2006. In 2001, Carnegie Mellon University Press reissued his first book of poetry, The Faces of Americans in 1853, in the Classic Contemporaries Series. A volume of his essays about poetry in New England, Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry, was published by Carnegie Mellon in 2003 in its Prose on Poetry Series. Some of the magazines and journals in which his poems and essays have appeared are: Agni, The Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountain Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Margie: An American Journal of Verse, Mid-American Review, New Criterion, New England Review, Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Slate, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Witness, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Yankee.

Wesley McNair is currently Professor Emeritus and Writer in Residence at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he directed the creative writing program and received the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Libra Professorship. He also served as a visiting professor in creative writing at Colby College. A McNair interview and essay appears in Contemporary Authors, volume 175, and has been reprinted on the next web page.

Books of poetry: The Faces of Americans of 1853 (University of Missouri Breakthrough Series, Devins Award, 1983); The Town of No (Godine, 1989); Twelve Journeys in Maine (Limited Edition, Romulus Editions, 1992); My Brother Running (Godine, 1994); The Town of No and My Brother Running (Godine dual reprint, 1997); The Dissonant Heart (Limited Edition, Romulus Editions, 1995: poetry with photocollages by Dozier Bell); Talking in the Dark (Godine, 1998); The Faces of Americans in 1853 (Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporaries Series reissue, 2001); Fire: Poems (Godine, 2002); The Ghosts of You and Me (Godine, 2006).

Other books: The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader (University Press of New England, 1994); Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of the CMU Prose on Poetry Series, 2002: memoir and essays); The Maine Poets (Down East Books, 2003); A Place On Water (essays, with Bill Roorbach and Robert Kimber, Tilbury House, 2004); Contemporary Maine Fiction (Down East Books, 2005); Fire (The narrative poem alone, in a limited deluxe edition, Forehand Press, forthcoming); First Person Maine (forthcoming from Down East Books, 2008).