Kearney, Meg 1964-

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Kearney, Meg 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born June 3, 1964, in New York, NY; daughter of Joseph S. (a school principal) and Trudy (a registered nurse) Kearney; married Michael Fleming (a writer and editor), July 31, 1999. Education: Attended Syracuse University, 1982-84; Marist College, B.A., 1986; City College, City University of New York, M.A., 1999. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—NH. Office—Office of the Director, MFA Program, Pine Manor College, 400 Heath St., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. Agent—Elaine Markson, 44 Greenwich Ave., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

Educator and writer. National Book Foundation, New York, NY, associate director, 1994-2005; New School University, New York, NY, adjunct instructor in creative writing, 2003-04; Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, MA, director of Graduate Creative Writing Program, 2005—. Member of board of directors, Mid-Hudson Association for Learning Disabled, 1993-94; member of advisory board, Frost Place Center for Poetry and the Arts, beginning 1997. Judge at poetry awards.

MEMBER:

Association for Learning Disabled, Hudson Valley Writers Association (president, 1993-94).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award, 1998; New York Times fellowship, 1998; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003; New York Foundation for the Arts artist's fellowship, 2001.

WRITINGS:

An Unkindness of Ravens: Poems, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 2001.

The Secret of Me, Persea Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Work anthologized in books, including Where Icarus Falls, Santa Barbara Review Publications (Santa Barbara, CA), 1998; Urban Nature, Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2000; Poets Grimm, Storyline Press, 2003; Irish-America Poets from the 18th Century to the Present, University of Notre Dame Press (Chicago, IL), 2004; Never Before: Poems about First Experiences, Four Way Books, 2005; Shade, Four Way Books, 2006; and Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 2007. Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Agni, Poetry, Ploughshares, Doubletake, Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, Florida Review, Washington Square, Witness, Free Lunch, Tar River Poetry, Pivot, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and Poetry Daily. Echoes (literary magazine), poetry editor, 1991-94.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and educator Meg Kearney's young-adult novel The Secret of Me reminiscent of a memoir, reveals the inner thoughts of a fourteen-year-old girl named Lizzie. A novel in verse, the book chronicles Lizzie's innermost thoughts regarding the fact that she was adopted, as well as her views on typical adolescent concerns. As Lizzie attempts to determine her biological background, she also comes to recognize the power of her own decisions and the ramifications those decisions bring. "Not only will adolescents feel expertly sensitized to issues of adoption," wrote a Kirkus Reviews critic in a review of The Secret of Me; "they will get a good dose of real poetry with unique and inspiriting language so often sacrificed for story in this genre." In School Library Journal, Marilyn Taniguchi stated that, through her "readable and heartfelt" poems, "Kearney creates a believable voice for her protagonist," and that The Secret of Me "will be welcomed by adults working with young adoptees."

Kearney once commented: "Growing up, I was lucky: my parents were readers and our house was full of books. Both of my parents read to me when I was a child, and took me to the local library to explore the stacks or sit in a circle on the rug in the children's room to listen during story hour. When I was old enough to venture out into the neighborhood on my own, I was drawn like a squirrel to nuts by the magical bookmobile that visited our community during the summer. I loved picture books like Harry the Dirty Dog and Hats for Sale, and one called The Man Who Didn't Wash His Dishes. I loved Mother Goose rhymes and Brothers Grimm stories. Later I fell for ‘Nancy Drew’ mysteries and any book I could find about American Indians. When I was thirteen, my favorite book was Alex Haley's Roots.

"It probably didn't surprise either of my parents when I started writing my own stories in second grade. Dad used to ask a friend to type these stories for me, a gesture that served as a proof of their tremendous value (I thought) and only encouraged me to write more. By the time I reached sixth grade, I'd switched to writing poetry but no longer shared what I wrote with my parents. Writing had become a way for me to sort out feelings and experienced, and suddenly it felt very private. It wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I started sharing my poems with other people.

"Years later, one of those ‘other people’ turned out to be one of my favorite writers, Jacqueline Woodson. I hired Jackie to teach at an intergenerational summer writing camp I used to run when I worked for the National Book Foundation. Jackie taught at the camp with me for eleven years (as did Norma Fox Mazer and two of my favorite poets, Cornelius Eady and Kimiko Hahn), and she and I became good friends. She would often tell me that I should write for young people. I'd smile when she said this, thinking ‘maybe someday,’ wondering if I really could write something that teens or pre-teens or even young children would like, but never actually sitting at my desk to give it a try.

"Then Jackie asked me to look at the manuscript of Locomotion, her novel-in-verse written in the voice of an eleven-year-old boy. She wanted my feedback as a poet, and I was honored to help, and then I was blown away by both this wonderful book and the fact that Jackie had written it in verse. In my mind, she was the fiction writer and I was the poet—and now she'd broken the ‘boundary’ with this marvelous novel made of poems. All along I'd been wary of prose, afraid I wasn't good at it, but Locomotion inspired me (it was possible to write a novel using a form I was comfortable with!) and challenged me (but could I pull it off?). I'd already read Karen Hesse's novel-in-verse, Out of the Dust, so I had another model to look to in addition to Locomotion.

"I started thinking about the idea—obsessing about it, really—and knew fairly quickly that my main character would be a girl somewhere between twelve and fourteen years old, and that she would be the youngest of three adopted children. Her voice came next in the form of a poem called ‘How I Arrived,’ and Lizzie McLane was born, so to speak. Lizzie is the fourteen-year-old I wish I had been—she is braver than I was at that age—and it almost felt like she was whispering those poems in my ear. We drafted them together, revised them together, read them out loud and revised them again. About a year and a half later, Lizzie and I had created something that turned out to be The Secret of Me."