Wesley McNair



Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored nine collections of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 2010). In addition to his career in poetry, McNair has written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose. He has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as guest editor of the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.

According to United States Artists, an important theme in McNair’s poetry reveals "the struggles of the economic misfits of northern New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details." McNair writes autobiographical poems that explore 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 brother’s fatal heart attack after months of desperate running with the explosion of NASA’s Challenger shuttle.

A New Hampshire native who has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, McNair 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 2011, McNair is professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington. In March 2011 he became Poet Laureate of Maine.

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 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 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. Featured on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, McNair's work has also appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over fifty anthologies and textbooks.

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." 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:


 * Scrapbooks, photographs, family letters, clippings and ephemera
 * Early writings (elementary through high school)
 * Notebooks with graduate school writings, teaching notes and poem drafts
 * Manuscript drafts, first appearances and audio/visual recordings
 * Extensive correspondence (Maine Times colleagues, Donald Hall, literary peers)
 * A video of McNair giving a slide presentation and talk about his papers, entitled My Life as a Poet.

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 scanned and transcribed notebook pages showing the development of selected poems, and presents them with final published texts, as well as related audio recordings. The site is accompanied by teaching and learning tools.

Click here to visit Colby College’s interactive McNair archive and teaching tools.