Next Reader

Photo Credit: Laura M. Slatkin

Maureen McLane

Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

April 3, 2025, 5:00 PM

Maureen N. McLane was raised in upstate New York and holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Oxford and the University of Chicago. She is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry; her most recent book of poems is What You Want: poems (FSG; Penguin UK, 2023). She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Czech and have recently appeared in London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poesia (Italy), The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books. Her latest book is My Poetics (Chicago, 2024), an adventure in poetic criticism. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at NYU.