Meg Kearney

Background

About Meg Kearney

Meg Kearney (pronounced “car-nee”) In spring 2021, The Word Works Press published Meg Kearney’s ALL MORNING THE CROWS, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry and the Silver Medal for Foreword Reviews' Indie Book Award for Poetry - it stayed on SPD's poetry bestseller list for seven months, April through October. Meg’s heroic crown of sonnets, THE ICE STORM, was published as a chapbook by Green Linden Press in September, 2020, and is now in its fourth printing. Green Linden published her second heroic crown, CARDIAC THRILL, in September 2025. Meg's collection of poems for adults, HOME BY NOW, won the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine Book of the Year. The title poem to Home By Now appears in Garrison Keillor’s GOOD POEMS: AMERICAN PLACES anthology (Viking 2011). Meg’s first collection of poetry, AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. She is also author of three novels-in-verse for teens: The Secret of Me (Persea 2005);The Girl in the Mirror (2012), named by Mom.Me as a great mother-daughter read; and When You Never Said Goodbye (2017), about which Jacqueline Woodson wrote:[this book]"is a gift to the world, a book you’ll want to read slowly, savoring both the eloquent writing and the brave and beautiful story." Meg's picture book, Trouper (the Three-Legged Dog), published by Scholastic in 2013 and illustrated by E.B. Lewis, was winner of the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and Missouri's Show Me Reader's Award, and has made more than half a dozen "best of the year" lists, including one of the most “Diverse and Impressive Picture Books of 2013” by the International Reading Association; and one of the 2013-14 season's best picture books by the Christian Science Monitor, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, and Bank Street College of Education; it was also a, Association of Children's Librarians of Northern CA Distinguished Book. Meg has taught poetry at The New School University, and is the founding Director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University in Massachusetts. She was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, for more than 11 years. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in myriad literary magazines and anthologies. A native New Yorker, Meg now lives in New Hampshire. For more information: