Irene McKinney

Irene McKinney is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. She is the author of six books of poetry: The Girl with a Stone in Her Lap (North Atlantic, 1976); The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (Chapbook, Small Plot Press, 1984); Quick Fire and Slow Fire (North Atlantic, 1988); Six O’Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), Vivid Companion (West Virginia University Press Nandalia, 2005), and Unthinkable: Selected Poems (Red Hen, 2007). She is editor of Back Country: Contemporary Writing In West Virginia, and has held fellowships at McDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. She was appointed Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1994. Recent poems and forthcoming poems are in American Voice, Arts & Letters, Artful Dodge, The Kenyon Review, Confluence, South Dakota Review, Kestrel, Poetry Northwest, Clackamas Literary Review, Georgia Review, Washington Square, Blackbird, Poetry, and Court Green. She has been writer-in-residence at University of California at Santa Cruz, Western Washington University at Bellingham, the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, and Lynchburg College. Her work has been featured five times on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and on Verse Daily. She is Director and founder of the Low Residency MFA, West Virginia Wesleyan.