Wesley McNair 
Maine
USA Ford Fellow, Literature

Wesley McNair (Mercer, Maine) is a poet of place, focusing on the struggles of the “economic misfits” of northern New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details. He has published eight collections of poetry, including The Faces of Americans of 1853, The Town of No, and The Ghosts of You and Me. He has also edited four collections of contemporary Maine writing. McNair has received many awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and the Robert Frost Prize. He has twice served on the nominating jury of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. McNair is currently in semiretirement from academia and serves as professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award. He is working on a memoir about his origins as a writer.

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Portrait photo courtesy Dan Habib