Brookline Poetry Series
Linda Pastan and Meg Kearney
May 16, 2010 Hunneman Hall
Linda Pastan was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1932. She graduated from Radcliffe College and received an M.A. from Brandeis University. She is the author of Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; An Early Afterlife (l995); Heroes In Disguise (1991), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (l982), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Five Stages of Grief (l978), and A Perfect Circle of Sun (l971). Among her many awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award. From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, and was among the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.
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 in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher’s guide, came out in 2007. Her latest collection of poems is Home By Now (Four Way Books, fall 2009). Meg’s picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis and is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012. 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, and The Gettysburg Review. Her work also is featured in 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 Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007); Sinatra: But Buddy, I’m a Kind of Poem (Entasis Press, 2008), and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” appears in The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer (Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press, 2005). Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. She was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards) in New York City. Recipient of 2001 Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, 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. 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. She currently resides in New Hampshire with her three-legged black Lab, Trooper.