A BRIEF HISTORY

Workshop at Kenyon College photo by Emily Zeller, 2008

Rebecca McClanahan is the author of nine books, most recently Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987-2007 (Iris Press) and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings (University of Georgia Press), which won the Glasgow Prize in Nonfiction, and Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively (Writer's Digest Books). Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Seventeen, and numerous literary magazines and anthologies throughout the country.

McClanahan has received a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Carter prize for the essay from Shenandoah. Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2001, The Best American Poetry 1998, and has been aired on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac," "The Sound of Writing," and "Living on Earth."

McClanahan, who earned a Ph.D. and M.A.T. from University of South Carolina and a B.A. from California State University, currently teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University (Charlotte, NC) and Pacific Lutheran University, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop and the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. Before moving to New York in 1998 she co-directed The University of North Carolina Writing Project and its affiliates, the Open Institute and the Reading-Writing Institute. For fifteen years she was Writer-in-Residence/Director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Poetry-in-the-Schools Program, for which she received a Governor's Award of Excellence.

For a "lite" history of Rebecca's life...