Fellow: Meg Kearney, Poet, New Ipswich

Meg Kearney is a novelist and poet. She has published two books of poems, An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now. She has also publisheda novel in verse for teens, The Secret of Me.  She is currently working on a children’s picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog.

Kearney has received numerous honors for her poetry, including the PEN New England LL Winship Award, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a New York Times fellowship, the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award, and has benefited from three residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been read aloud on Garrison Keillor’s radio feature A Writer’s Almanac.

She currently works as director of the low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill in Massachusetts, and is director of their Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For her "community project," Kearney identified a goal of working with students who are underserved in terms of access to poetry and the arts. With the help of art teacher Christopher Morse, Kearney will be working with the students at Mascoma Regional High School.

In her artist’s statement, Kearney wrote: “At its core, my poems are an exploration of identity, both on the personal and community level: who are we, and how did we get here? Can knowing the answers to these questions give us an idea of where we are headed? Poetry for me is a way of exploring our basic humanity. That’s why I often tell people that it is one path toward world peace; by sharing poems across cultures, we find that we have more in common than not.”

Last updated: January 28, 2011