Wesley McNair

Wesley McNair
Born 1941
New Hampshire
Known for Poet
Website
www.wesleymcnair.com

Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored ten volumes of poetry, most recently, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (David R. Godine, 2014). He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry. In addition, he has also edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry of the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.

According to United States Artists, much of McNair’s poetry deals with "the struggles of the economic misfits of northern New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details."[1] In The Words I Chose, McNair refers to the region of his poetry as "a place of farmers under threat, ethnic shop workers, traders, and misfits at the margins" and his exploration of "their American dreams, failures, self-doubts, and restlessness."[2] McNair also writes autobiographical poems that reveal the difficulty of family bonds and critique American culture, sometimes mixing the two themes together, as in his long narrative piece "My Brother Running," in which he links his brothers fatal heart attack, after months of desperate running, with the explosion of NASA's Challenger shuttle. In his most recent collection, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, he deals with characters and themes derived from the Ozarks of southern Missouri, where his mother grew up.

A New Hampshire native who has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, McNair received his undergraduate degree from Keene State College and has earned two degrees from Middlebury College, an MA in English, and an M.Litt. in American literature. He has also studied American literature, art, and history at Dartmouth College, sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

As of 2014, McNair is professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.[3] In March 2011 he became Poet Laureate of Maine.[4]

Honors and awards

McNair has received two Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his other honors are the Theodore Roethke Prize, The Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, the Devins Award for Poetry, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal[5] for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters.” In 2006, he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship.

Publishing history

McNair’s poems have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Gettysburg Review, Green Mountain Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, The New Criterion, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Witness, and Yankee Magazine.[6] Featured more than 20 times on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs), McNair's work has also appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over sixty anthologies and textbooks.[7]

Critical praise

Writing on McNair's collection The Ghosts of You and Me for the literary journal Ploughshares in the winter of 2009-2007, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine called McNair "one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry." In the same journal in the fall of 2002, Maxine Kumin, the United States Poet Laureate from 1981 to 1982, called McNair "a master craftsman, with a remarkable ear." In a 1989 review that appeared in the Harvard Review, Donald Hall, who served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007, remarked, "Because he is a true poet, his New England is unlimited. Whole lives fill small lines, real to this poet, therefore to us." In the summer of 2002, the Ruminator Review wrote of McNair's book Fire that the poet has created "one of the most individual and original bodies of work by a poet of his generation."

Collected papers

McNair’s extensive papers were purchased by Colby College in 2006. Taking up approximately 100 linear feet in the college library’s Special Collections, the Wesley McNair Papers include:

In 2010, Colby College’s Special Collections Librarian Patricia Burdick launched an innovative new Web site that utilities McNair’s poetry to increase understanding of and appreciation for the making of poetry. The interactive site includes audio recordings and manuscript samples to show the development of selected poems. The site is accompanied by teaching and learning tools. In 2014, McNair's site at Colby launched Letters Between Poets, featuring his correspondence with a mentor, Donald Hall, during his early struggles as a poet. The online correspondence may be accessed by chapters, themes, poems in progress, and a keyword search.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

Essay collections

Anthologies edited

References

  1. ↑ USA Fellows 2006 > Wesley McNair Bio
  2. ↑ The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press), page 58
  3. ↑ USA Fellows 2006 > Wesley McNair Bio
  4. ↑ http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/poets/maine.html
  5. ↑ Poetry Foundation > Poet: Wesley McNair (1941 -- )
  6. ↑ Author Website
  7. ↑ AGNI Online Wesley McNair Bio & Poem Bibliography

Sources

External links

McNair Online Features at Colby College