Kelly McQuain (born February 5)

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Kelly McQuain is a writer, artist and college professor living in Philadelphia. He grew up in West Virginia surrounded by the wooded mountains of Monongahela National Forest. His family back home still live on a dirt road bearing the McQuain name. He is the author of VELVET RODEO, which won the 2013 Bloom Chapbook Prize, judged by poet C. Dale Young. The collection includes poems published in several national journals, including “Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers”, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the journal Kestrel.

As a writer, McQuain’s poems have been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer and on National Public Radio’s Tell Me More as part of National Poetry Month. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Chelsea Station, Assaracus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Stone Highway Review, Press 1, American Writing, Texture, Black Heart Magazine, Transient, Certain Circuits, Apiary, Nada and more. His prose has appeared in The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, The James White Review and Icarus: the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. His essays and stories have been anthologized in over a dozen publications, including: Obsessed; Skin & Ink; Rebel Yell 2; Best American Erotica; Best Gay Erotica; Rough Trade; The Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity; and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Men on Men 2000. He is a former contributing editor at the Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly and Art & Understanding (A&U). He has won writing fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and he serves on the “One Book, One Philadelphia” Selection Committee in Philadelphia. Currently a professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, he formerly worked as an illustrator of superhero comics. His occasional columns on city life debuted in The Philadelphia Inquirer in July 2012.

You can study creative writing or literature with Professor McQuain at Community College of Philadelphia. Learn more at http://www.ccp.edu/site/academic/creativewriting/. McQuain holds an MA in Fiction from Temple University and an MFA in Drama and Communications/Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. He attended Temple as an undergrad as well and also did a stint at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

McQuain sees education as a lifelong process and believes that travel teaches oneself about the world in a way that breaks down barriers and promotes understanding. To that end, he has participated in writing retreats in places as varied as Mexico, Prague, Madrid, Edinburgh and the south of France. He is an alumnus of the East-West Center in Honolulu, HI (2007), where he participated in the Asian Studies Development Program, and more recently he was one of sixteen academics chosen by the East-West Center and the Chinese Ministry of Education to tour China’s historical landmarks and leading academic institutions (summer 2013). His other scholarly awards include being an NEH fellow in the Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop (2011). His travels and academic research infuse his teaching as well as his writing.

Velvet Rodeo won a 2014 Rainbow Award as Best LGBT Poetry.

Source: kellymcquain.wordpress.com/about/

Further Readings:

VELVET RODEO 
is now available for $8
from the fine folks at BLOOM.
Copies are limited. Order at:
http://bloomliteraryjournal.org/shop/velvet-rodeo/

VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain is the recent winner of the Bloom Chapbook Prize, judged by poet C. Dale Young who wrote of it: “‘The tongue I try to master / is a sticky one, forked and full of tricks,’ is the opening of a poem in Velvet Rodeo, and it becomes a point of return for the collection. These poems understand that to tell the truth, one must lie, play tricks, and even dare to say the unbelievable. Careful and exacting, these poems exact a price from a reader. They linger with you long after you have finished reading them.”

More Rainbow Awards at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, Rainbow Awards/2014