WriterWes McNair
McNair is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writers, and in 2006 a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000, fifty of which were awarded across the arts to a selection of "America's finest living artists." Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry (for Fire); the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal (also awarded to Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, et. al.) for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters." He has received three honorary degrees for literary distinction.
A two-time recipient of Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, Wesley McNair has read his poetry at the Library of Congress and a wide range of colleges and universities. A television series aired over affiliates of PBS on Robert Frost for which he wrote the scripts received an Emmy Award. Featured on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition (Saturday and Sunday programs) and 14 times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, his work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Annual, two editions of The Best American Poetry, and over sixty anthologies and textbooks. He has served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Some of the magazines and journals in which his poems and essays have appeared are: Agni, The Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountain Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Margie: An American Journal of Verse, Mid-American Review, New Criterion, New England Review, Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Slate, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Witness, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Yankee.
Wesley McNair is currently Professor Emeritus and Writer in Residence at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he directed the creative writing program and received the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Libra Professorship. He also served as a visiting professor in creative writing at Colby College, which acquired his personal papers in 2006. An extended essay on McNair with an interview appears in Contemporary Authors, volume 175.
