The characters of Meg Kearney's gritty second poetry collection travel the shadows and edges of modern life. Searching for home and knowing that, once found, home might dissolve without warning, Kearney carves a richly lyric poetry. You will hear the voices of this striking book right in your ear, telling hard-learned lessons that are as unsettling as they are necessary.
Meg Kearney's first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher's guide (available for free on the author's Web site), came out in 2007. Four Way Books published her newest collection of poems, Home By Now, in fall 2009. Home By Now is the winner of the 2010 PEN New England Award as well as a Finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Meg's picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic (date TBA). Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor's "A Writer's Almanac," and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, and Ploughshares, and the anthologies Urban Nature (Milkweed, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press 2005).
Recipient of an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998. Meg is currently Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, as well as Director of Pine Manor's Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University.
For more information, visit www.megkearney.com.
