Irene McKinney

Irene McKinney (April 20, 1939 – February 4, 2012) She had five siblings (two older siblings named Harold Durrett and Eleanor Leary and three younger siblings named Ralph Waldo Durrett, Janet Stonerook and Eileen Martin). Her family grew most of their food on their farm due to the struggle of living on one income and having to feed eight mouths in the house.

She attended a one-room school, Concord School, for first through fifth grades. McKinney recalls that her second grade teacher, Mrs. Teeter, recognized and encouraged her by giving her a double promotion from second to fourth grade. From a young age, her father Ralph Durrett, a schoolteacher, read her works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, and Pinocchio.

Irene graduated Belington High School in 1956 married her high school boyfriend Joe McKinney. They later had two children named Julia Vickers nee McKinney and Paul McKinney. Initially a stay-at-home mom, her interest in poetry and literature was piqued when she discovered that the library in Buckhannon (Buckhannon Public Library) where she lived had a lot of books that she was really interested in learning from. Through this activity, she became highly influenced by the likes of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.

She later got a fellowship from West Virginia University for her work and was also one of the first students to complete a creative thesis at WV University. Her dissertation was her first poetry collection, Room for the Wakers. Though she retired in 2000, she was still active and continued to teach at Wesleyan College.

During the last two years of her life, McKinney dedicated herself to fulfilling her dream of creating a program at West Virginia Wesleyan College which situated “good writing [as] the center of a community, with its roots in the region of the writers [while] also being able to reference the outside world”. She developed the Low-Residency MFA (Master of Fine Arts) Program

She died of cancer at the family home in Barbour County at the age of 72.

McKinney was proud of her West Virginia rural heritage, which she constantly referenced in her poetry. She said, "When people say this state is backward, I simply am astounded. I had access to a farm community, a small peaceful town and school and good, dedicated teachers. I was in nature and in literature--a perfect combination for a writer". and Potomac State College of West Virginia University named her a 2005 Whitmore-Gates Scholar. and at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986 for Creative Writing.

As for individual awards, she received The Utah Arts Council Prize Award in Fiction, The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (Small Plot Press, 1984) Quick Fire and Slow Fire (North Atlantic Books, 1988) Vivid Companion (Vandalia Press, 2004) Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009)

As editor Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (Editor, Vandalia Press, 2002) Cofounder of Trellis, a West Virginia Poetry Journal, with fellow Appalachian Poet Maggie Anderson and Winston Fuller in 1971 (she worked on it from 1973 - 1979). Assistant Editor for Quarterly West, an American literary magazine at the University of Utah