Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival.

Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival. http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com



She will join poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Tino Villanueva, fiction writer Junot Diaz, and others to be announcedNov. 15, 2008.



See Bio below:



Meg Kearney (“car-nee”)



Meg Kearney’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released by Persea Books in 2005. A paperback edition of the novel will be published in tandem with a teacher’s guide in late 2007.

Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998); Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline Press, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way Books, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press 2005). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” will be appear in The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer and forthcoming by Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007.

Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Early in her career, she organized educational programs and conducted power plant tours for a gas and electric company in upstate New York.

Recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998; the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in 1997; and the Frances B. DeNagy Poetry Award from Marist College in 1985. She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1999, 2000, and 2001. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal, and past president of the Hudson Valley Writers Association of upstate New York.

Meg was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. She received her MA in Poetry from The City College, City University of New York, in 1999. She resides in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Mike Fleming, and their three-legged black Lab, Trooper.