Turner Public Library
Welcomes Wesley McNair

You are cordially invited to attend a poetry reading and book signing with Wesley McNair at the Turner Public Library on Thursday, April 23, 2009, at 7:00 pm.

His poems deal often comically but always affectionately with hardscrabble Mainers and thoughtful looks at his own life. He muses with some ruefulness on his early hopes and examines the ways in which we negotiate between the lives we live and the more distant things we dream of.

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.". Wesley McNair has served three times on the Nominating Jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and is a two-time recipient of residencies at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy. A recent series on Robert Frost, for which McNair wrote the scripts, was aired over affiliates of PBS and received an Emmy Award.

McNair is the author of nine collections of poetry, including seven full-length volumes and two limited editions, and a volume of essays about poetry. His recent collections of verse are Talking in the Dark, Fire, and current volume, The Ghosts of You and Me, published in 2006. A volume of new and selected poems, Lovers of the Lost, is forthcoming in 2009, and a memoir The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry, will appear in 2010.

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.

There will be a question and answer period following the reading. Light refreshments will be served. We think you will leave finding Maine a more interesting place, and with a heightened awareness that your life, and the lives of those around you, matter.