Wesley McNair

Poet Philip Levine has called Wesley McNair “one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” He is the author of nine volumes of poems and twenty-one books, including poetry, nonfiction, and edited anthologies. McNair has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller grants for study at the Bellagio Center in Italy, and two NEA fellowships. He has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress, and has served four times on the Pulitzer jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Other honors include the Eunice Tietjens prize from Poetry magazine, the Theodore Roethke Prize, an Emmy Award, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters,” a United States Artist Fellowship, and the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry. His poems have been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and twenty-two times on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in the Pushcart Prize annual (for which he served as a poetry editor in 2010), The Best American Poetry, and over sixty anthologies and textbooks. His most recent books are The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (2014), The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (2013); and Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems (2010). A new collection, The Unfastening, will appear in the spring of 2017.