Michael McFee reads from We Were Once Here, his new book of poems

Thursday, 2/16, 7pm:
Michael McFee reads from We Were Once Here, his new book of poems

We're thrilled to host Michael McFee as he reads from his newest collection of poems!

In We Were Once Here, Michael McFee continues to write inventive appreciations of often-overlooked subjects, particularly the people and language of his native Appalachia. This new collection contains thoughtful and playful celebrations of such things as snoring, a wall telephone from the 1960s, yardsticks, the Sunday newspaper, and Fats Waller. It also extends the poet’s characteristic lyric keenness into longer work, including a twenty-one-part centerpiece elegy for his niece. The book concludes with, and is framed by, poems that explore the bittersweet enduring joys of “here.”

Michael McFee has taught poetry writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1990. He is the author of eleven full-length books of poetry, most recently We Were Once Here, and The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press, 2007), a chapbook of one-line poems. His second collection of essays, Appointed Rounds, is forthcoming from Mercer University Press. In 2009, he received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.