Poet
KERRIN MCCADDEN
Poet
BIO
Kerrin McCadden received the 2022 Herb Lockwood Prize for excellence in the arts in Vermont. She is the author of two collections of poetry, American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021), finalist for the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award, and Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2014), winner of the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Keep This to Yourself (Button Poetry, 2020), won the Button Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in such places as Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and on The Slowdown. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. McCadden holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex. She is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States and lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
AMERICAN WAKE
(Black Sparrow Press, 2021)
Praise for American Wake:
“Kerrin McCadden is haunted by her family’s migration from Ireland (“Hold a wake for the living, the leaving”) and tells a very American story in American Wake, a textured story of loss and gain, of what she calls “prodigal ghosts,” the Old World and the New World, too, the broken family patched together, somehow sustained, ongoing. This book slows things down that are speeding past and wakes us up to the past and present tense. I love its worried wakefulness.”
—Edward Hirsch, author of Stranger by Night
“Contrasting the luscious femininities of a Tess Gallagher in her peregrinations from Washington to Sligo with the stern abrasions of a Seamus Heaney translating himself from Station Island to Harvard, Kerrin McCadden’s American Wake explores in depth the repercussions of emigration from generation to tragic generation, at one point receding as far back as Cuchulain.”
—Medbh McGuckian, author of Marine Cloud Brightening
"The core of Kerrin McCadden’s music is a purifying sound that ritualizes grief but also posits joy and curiosity as vested markers of living fully in the face of difficult times. McCadden is a storyteller as much as a singer. American Wake navigates loss, no doubt, but with such unparalleled sensitivity and inventiveness that language becomes its own jubilant force of survival. A reader will find instructive the profound care and assuredness by which she handles family stories and shared memories that border on a kind holiness of singing and a shaping of sacred narratives."
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
KEEP THIS TO YOURSELF
Winner of the 2019 Button Poetry Prize.
Praise for Keep This to Yourself:
In this devastating sequence of poems, Kerrin McCadden transforms tragedy into myth. Or at least attempts to—as so often happens, our dead refuse to stay dead. A river runs through this book, as well as the promise to come clean, which we sense can only end one way. A storm named heroin has taken possession of a family, as it has taken possession of many families—these poems are as close as I’ve come to standing inside this brittle, incomprehensible moment.
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You
LANDSCAPE WITH PLYWOOD SILHOUETTES
Praise for Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes:
Kerrin McCadden’s Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is one of the most compelling and powerful debut collections in recent American poetry. These exquisite meditations on the lived life are often nothing less than stunning, and are at times truly devastating. This gorgeous collection is both mature and tender in its reckonings of our shifting relationships with family and loved ones. Kerrin McCadden is especially accomplished in considering those who’ve engaged in constructions of daily happiness only to discover that what they’d begun in dream has ended in quiet wreckage. Poem by poem, we are consoled by the poet’s remarkable reflective ease and her profound intimacy. The beauty of these of these poems is matched only by their sense of triumph in resilience, and its resulting peace.
—David St. John, author of The Last Troubador, contest judge
PRESS/INTERVIEWS/REVIEWS
A REVIEW OF KERRIN MCCADDEN'S AMERICAN WAKE
The Adroit Journal
"Towards the end of “Awake,” McCadden writes, “Somewhere, / someone finds me phenomenal.” Well, that somewhere is here; I find Kerrin McCadden phenomenal. McCadden ends “Awake” with the line: “I forget who is playing for fair and who for keeps.” Let me tell you, Kerrin McCadden is definitely playing for keeps."
SOME POEMS
UPCOMING EVENTS
MAY 8, 2024, 8:00-9:00PM
Vermont Studio Center
I'll be the visiting writer at Vermont Studio Center for Vermont Week. Reading in the Red Mill Building is open to the public. Details here.
APRIL 16, 2024, 7:00-8:00PM
Eagle Pond Author's Series
(in person)
I'll be reading poems at Plymouth State College in the Silver Center for the Arts. Tickets available here.
MAY 2, 2021, 7:00PM
Mercy Street Reading Series (virtual)
Details to come.
APRIL 15, 2021
I'll be reading at the Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, Missouri (virtually). Details here.
Unbound Book Festival
APRIL 1, 2021, 7:00PM (EST)
Phoenix Books Book Launch Reading (virtual)
I'll be reading from American Wake to celebrate its release. Please register in advance for this event. Signed copies are available at this event--to be mailed following. Details here.
MARCH 24, 2021
Poets on the Plaza Reading Series (virtual)
Reading with Elizabeth Powell, Adrie Kusserow, Nancy Mitchell. Details to come.
MARCH 6, 2021, 11:10AM
AWP Conference (virtual)
Panel: MFA to ELA: Teaching K-12 Students, with Molly Sutton Kiefer, Kenyatta Rogers, Claire Wahmanholm, and William Archila). Details to come. Conference registration required.
MARCH 4, 2021, 7:00PM
I'll be reading poems and talking poetry with poet Matthew Lippman. Details here.
Writer to Writer Reading Series, Vermont Studio Center (virtual)
CONTACT
Please fill out this form to contact Kerrin McCadden
