Maine’s Poet Laureate to speak March 4

    DOVER-FOXCROFT — Wesley McNair, Maine’s fourth Poet Laureate and author of  “The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry”, will speak at the next event in the James Brown Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 4 at the Thompson Free Library. The free public talk will begin at 6 p.m.

    McNair’s appearance is being jointly supported by the library and the Foxcroft Academy English Department. McNair will also speak to Foxcroft Academy students during the day on March 4 in the school’s Muriel P. Watson Library. At FA, his subject will be “My Life as a Poet”, using material drawn from McNair’s personal papers, which are held in the special collections archive at Colby College’s Miller Library.
    For the James Brown Lecture that evening at the Thompson Free Library, McNair will read from his most recent book “The Words I Chose”, a memoir that tells how he developed into a poet against the odds, incorporating his struggles into his art.
    Beginning in poverty and a broken home in rural New Hampshire, McNair went on, through family hardships and setbacks, to become what U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine has called “one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” He is known for his autobiographical poems based on everyday life in northern New England.
    A longtime resident of Mercer, McNair is 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 is the author of nine volumes of poems and 20 books, including poetry, nonfiction and edited anthologies. His poetry has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and 21 times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. It has also appeared in Best American Poetry and over 60 anthologies and textbooks.
    McNair is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for creative writers. In 2006, he received a United States Artists Fellowship of $50,000 as one of “America’s finest living artists.”
    Other honors include the Robert Frost Prize; the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry; the Devins Award for poetry; the Eunice Teitjens Prize from Poetry magazine; the Theodore Roethke prize from Poetry Northwest; the Pushcart Prize; and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters.” He received an Emmy Award after writing the scripts for a television series on Robert Frost, which appeared on affiliates of PBS.
    McNair has twice been invited to read his poetry at the Library of Congress, has given readings at a wide range of colleges and universities, and served as a visiting professor of creative writing at Colby. He has served four times on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
    McNair earned an undergraduate degree from Keene State (N.H.) College, was awarded master’s degrees in both English and American literature from Middlebury College, and studied literature under his NEH fellowship at Dartmouth College. He has received five honorary degrees for literary distinction.
    The lecture series has been endowed with memorial funds donated to the Thompson Free Library in memory of James Brown, who died in a boating accident in 2008. The series presents lectures on topics related to literature, history and culture. Brown was the longtime chair of the English Department at Foxcroft Academy and was also president of the Thompson Free Library Association.