Maureen N. McLane (born December 24, 1967) is an American poet, critic, and professor. She received the 2002 National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Early life and education
Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York. She received a BA from Harvard University in 1989, earned a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where she received another BA in 1991, and got her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1997.
Career McLane is the author of five books of poetry. Her first full-length poetry collection, Same Life: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award.
Her follow-up book, World Enough: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), was selected by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker as a best poetry book of the year.
McLane achieved greater recognition with the publication of her hybrid criticism-memoir My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography. The Paris Review editor Lorin Stein called it "the survey course of my dreams." My Poets was lauded in The New York Times, NPR, The New York Observer, and The Boston Globe. Writing in Bookforum, Parul Sehgal remarked: "To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she's at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy."
This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
She is the Henry James Professor of English and American letters at New York University. McLane has also been a contributor to Boston Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post. In 2023, she received the James Merrill House Fellowship.
Awards +YearNominated WorkAwardCategoryResultRef.2002National Book Critics Circle AwardsNona Balakian Citation for Excellence in ReviewingWinner2009Same LifePublishing Triangle AwardsAudre Lorde AwardFinalist2010Lambda Literary AwardsLesbian Poetry2012My PoetsNational Book Critics Circle AwardsMemoir and AutobiographyNew York University College of Arts and Science Golden Dozen AwardWinner2014This BlueNational Book AwardsPoetryFinalist2017Some SayThe Believer Book AwardsPoetryShortlisted2018Publishing Triangle AwardsAudre Lorde AwardFinalist2021New York University College of Arts and Science Golden Dozen AwardWinner
Bibliography
Poetry Collections
Some Say: Poems. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2017. What I'm Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017. Penguin. 2019. More Anon: Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 2021.
Poems TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected"Taking a walk in the woods after having taken a walk in the woods with you"2013The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 2. February 25, 2013.
Non-fiction
References