Meg Kearney

Meg Kearney (“car-nee”)

Click on the "Archive" button above to return to the Features archives

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, came out in 2007. Her most recent collection of poems is Home By Now (Four Way Books, October 2009). Meg’s picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012 and will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis. 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, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review. Her work also is featured in the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998), Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline Press, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way Books, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007); Sinatra: But Buddy, I’m a Kind of Poem (Entasis Press, 2008), and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” appears The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer (Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press, 2005).

Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For eleven 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. Early in her career, she organized educational programs and conducted power plant tours for a gas & electric company in upstate New York.

She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Recipient of 2001 Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998; the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in 1997; and the Frances B. DeNagy Poetry Award from Marist College in 1985. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal, and past president of the Hudson Valley Writers Association of upstate New York.

Meg was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Hudson Valley, seventy-five miles north of New York City. She currently resides in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trooper. For more information, visit www.megkearney.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ticket

I have a ticket in my pocket that will take me from Lynchburg

to New York in nine hours, from the Blue Ridge to Stuy Town,

from blue jays wrangling over sunflower seeds to my alarm

clock and startled pigeons. If I had a daughter I'd take her

with me. She'd sit by the window wearing the blue dress

with the stars and sickle moons, counting houses and cemeteries,

watching the knotted rope of fence posts slip by while I sat

beside her pretending to read, but unable to stop studying

her in disbelief. Her name would tell her that she's beautiful.

Belle. Or something strong, biblical. Sarah. She would tolerate