Maureen McLane

Maureen N. McLane (born December 24, 1967) is an American poet, critic, and professor. She received the 2002 National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Early life and education

Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York. She received a BA from Harvard University in 1989, earned a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where she received another BA in 1991, and got her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1997.

Career McLane is the author of five books of poetry. and the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award.

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.

McLane achieved greater recognition with the publication of her hybrid criticism-memoir My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography. My Poets was lauded in The New York Times, NPR, The New York Observer, and The Boston Globe. Writing in Bookforum, Parul Sehgal remarked: "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." This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.

She is the Henry James Professor of English and American letters at New York University.

Awards