Kind words for Irene McKinney
I grew up on a farm in Pleasants County.
I left there and lived in Morgantown for many years and then even more years now in Charleston and South Charleston…. It seems I’ve been everywhere in West Virginia, saturated wth everything West Virginia all my life. For all this, I am fascinated by any writing or audio by West Virginia’s poet laureate, Irene McKinney. She is not just a regional poet, though. She transcends that. To me, her poems crackle with energy. I think they would if I were from anywhere.
I see that Irene McKinney is beginning a series of essays. Listen to one called “Community” on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Watch for her at the West Virginia Book Festival this fall at the Charleston Civic Center.
In advance, read up on her online at poets.org and at the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Dip into a book she edited not so long ago: “Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia.”
You’ll find a nice sampling of her poetry in “Backcountry,” along with work by Maggie Anderson, Mary Lee Settle, Mark DeFoe, Pinckney Benedict, Tom Andrews, Lisa Koger, Louise McNeill, Meredith Sue Willis, Timothy Russell, Lee Maynard, Llewellyn McKernan, Denise Giardina, Davis Grubb, A.E. Stringer, Richard Currey, John McKernan, Breece D’j Pancake, Victor Depta, Ann Pancake, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Jayne Anne Phillips.
I have a special place in my heart for the poetry journal Trellis One and Trellis Two she edited with Winston Fuller and Maggie Anderson.
More books by Irene McKinney:
Vivid Companion: Poems
Six O’Clock Mine Report
Quick Fire and Slow Fire: Poems
The Girl With the Stone in Her Lap
