Maureen N. McLane

McLane was raised in upstate New York. She holds degrees from Harvard University, University of Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar), and University of Chicago. She is the author of four books of poetry, including This Blue. My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. McLane is also a contributing editor at Boston Review and poetry editor at Grey. She is currently Professor of English at New York University.[1][2]

McLane's first full-length poetry collection (Same Life: poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and The Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award. It was named as one of the Chicago Tribune Literary Editor's Best Books. 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.[3] McLane achieved literary celebrity with the publication of her hybrid criticism-biography My Poets, which Paris Review editor Lorin Stein called "the survey course of my dreams."[4] My Poets was lauded in The New York Times, NPR, Bookforum, New York Observer, Boston Globe, and elsewhere for its groundbreaking hybridity.[5]

Writing in Bookforum, Parul Sehgal remarked that "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."[6]

• National Book Critics Circle 2012 Finalist in Autobiography
• Golden Dozen Award, New York University College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Award, 2012
• New York University Humanities Institute, Faculty Award for Publishing the Most Books in 2008
• Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Committee on Undergraduate Education, 2006
• John Clive Teaching Award in History and Literature, Harvard University, 2005
• National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, 2003