• Biographical Information
• Critical Responses
• Works Published
• Selected Bibliography
• Author Website

Biographical Information

West Virginia Poet Laureate and West Virginia Wesleyan College faculty member Irene McKinney grew up in rural West Virginia raised on the family farm that had been her family’s home for generations. Her parents raised six children, growing much of their own food on the 300-acre farm and surviving on her father’s West Virginia schoolteacher’s salary. The family’s farmhouse had lacked both indoor plumbing and central heat. McKinney married her high school boyfriend at 17, shortly after graduation. The couple had 2 children. McKinney later decided to pursue higher education despite her then-husband’s lack of support. McKinney enrolled in West Virginia Wesleyan College, completing a bachelor’s degree in English in 1968 at the age of 29. She received a fellowship from West Virginia University for graduate work, earning an MA in 1970, becoming one of the first students to complete a creative thesis.

McKinney returned to Wesleyan in 1971 as instructor. She also taught briefly at Buckhannon-Upshur High School, where her students included the then-sixteen Jayne Anne Phillips. She later decided to continue her education, enrolling in a new graduate program at the University of Utah, which allowed students to complete a creative dissertation. McKinney earned her PhD in 1980—her dissertation a poetry collection called Room for the Wakers. She returned to Wesleyan as a professor of English and creative writing in 1991. McKinney continues to teach English and writing at Wesleyan, despite her retirement in 2000. She lives now on a 35-acre portion of her family’s farm, in a home full of books and art. Then-Governor Gaston Caperton appointed her West Virginia poet laureate in 1994.

In addition to her work as poet laureate and her teaching responsibilities at Wesleyan, McKinney has taught at other institutions including Western Washington University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Hamilton College. She has spent time as a visiting writer-in-residence at Alderson-Broaddus College, in South Carolina public schools, and at the University of Kerla in India. With Maggie Anderson, she co-founded Trellis, a West Virginia poetry journal. She has also served as an assistant editor for Quarterly West. McKinney has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowments for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Utah Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. McKinney has published four poetry collections—The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap, The Wasps at the Blue Hexagon, Quick Fire and Slow Fire, Six O’Clock Mine Report—as well as having work appear in numerous periodical publications.

Critical Responses

In an interview with Mark Dalessandro, Irene McKinney once remarked “Poetry is a place for truth-telling. In Our society, the truth is often obscured, often for commercial reasons, whether it be advertising, a lecture or a political speech…There is no commercial benefit to poetry., There is no worldly reason to become a poet.” As a poet, McKinney’s voice rings with truth—about herself, about her homeland, about all this is or has been. Patrick W. Conner, chair of the West Virginia University English Department and Centennial Professor of English once commented on Irene McKinney and her work – “No other state writer so embodies the region’s character. Her poems consistently enact the daily joys and hardships of individuals recognizably Appalachian, yet clearly and distinctly American.” In an essay on McKinney, Megan Valentine remarked that “she [McKinney] instills in the reader an actual sense of the core of Appalachia.” John Wehrle, in his review of the McKinney-edited Backcountry, wrote that the collection “ranges from the homespun to the bizarre, but there is very little here that won’t make you backtrack, re-read, and think again.” Her work is deeply rooted – both in its sense of personal searching and enlightenment and in the stones of the mountains McKinney calls home. A reviewer of Six O’Clock Mine Report said

These poems are personal the way meditation is personal. These are poems written out of a very grounded, place-anchored life: the West Virginia mountains, abandoned houses, and burning mines of the poet’s roots. The landscape is raw, animated, and particular. A beautifully crafted voice is at work here in the rhythmic language of authority that knows a thing and a place well.

Works Published

• Room for the Wakers
• The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap
• The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons
• Quick Fire and Slow Fire
• Six O'Clock Mine Report

Selected Bibliography

Anderson, Belinda. The Secret to Continuous Creativity: A Profile of West Virginia's Poet Laureate. Appalachian Journal 6(9), November 2000.

Anderson, Maggie and Jayne Anne Phillips. A Great Tug at the Heart. Trellis, Spring 1980. [Reprinted in Hamilton Review Winter 1983]

Lavender, David. West Virginia Poet Takes Center Stage. Herald-Dispatch, November 9, 2002.

Mann, Jeff. A Conversation with Irene McKinney. In Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women's Poetry. Felicia Mitchell, ed. University of Tennessee Press, 2002. pp.194-205.

Schneider, Rebecca Dinan. Bringing Poetry to the People: Six State Poets Proclaim Virtue of Verse. Writer 114(4), April 2001.

Writing the Truth: Poet Laureate Irene McKinney. West Virginia University Alumni Magazine 23(3), Fall 1999.

Author Website

none available