Irene McKinney, poet laureate of West Virginia, will read from her work Wednesday, February 17, at 7:30 p.m. in Hopwood Auditorium with a reception and book signing to follow.
McKinney is LC’s 2010 Thornton Writer-in-Residence. She is the author of The Girl with a Stone in Her Lap (North Atlantic, 1976): The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (Small Plot Press, 1984): Quick Fire and Slow Fire (North Atlantic, 1988): Six O’Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989): Vivid Companion (Vandalia Press, 2004): and Unthinkable: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2009).
She edited the anthology Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (West Virginia University Press, 2002). She was appointed poet laureate of West Virginia in 1994. Her poems have appeared in leading journals, including American Voice, Arts & Letters, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry. She completed a PhD at the University of Utah.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Richard H. Thornton Endowment in English and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.