Irene McKinney

She was awarded residencies at The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Utah Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, West Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Potomac State College of West Virginia University named her a 2005 Whitmore-Gates Scholar.

She was also awarded/granted fellowships at MacDowell Colony in 1982 and 1995, and at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986 for Creative Writing.

She later got a fellowship from West Virginia University for her work and was also one of the first students to complete a creative thesis at WV University. Her dissertation was her first poetry collection, Room for the Wakers. McKinney was also the protégé of and editor for Louise McNeill, fellow poet and the predecessor to the Poet Laureate position for West Virginia from 1979 to her death in 1993. Irene helped edit for her and her friendship and relationship with Louise helped her move towards focusing on regionalism (focusing on local dialect, customs, and other features for a specific region) in her writing and poems. McKinney's poetry is steeped in the rural Appalachian landscape and frequently explores the connections between people and place. Though she retired in 2000, she was still active and continued to teach at Wesleyan College.

As a teacher, she taught at West Virginia Wesleyan College (Professor Emeritus - from 1971 until she went to complete her Master's and then she came back in 1991 as a professor of English and director of creative writing), Buckhannon-Upshur High School (she taught now well-known novelist Jayne Anne Phillips), Western Washington University, UC Santa Cruz, Hamilton College, Potomac State College, University of Utah, and Huttonsville Correctional Center.

Even though her husband was reluctant to her going back to school to further her education, she pursued her Bachelors, Master's, and even her PHD. She received her B.A. in English Literature at West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1968, her M.A. at West Virginia University in 1970 and her PhD in English literature with a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Utah in 1980.

Irene graduated Belington High School in 1956 married her high school boyfriend Joe McKinney at Fort Ashby, West Virginia; they later had 2 children named Julia Vickers nee McKinney and Paul McKinney. Initially a stay-at-home mom, her interest in poetry and literature was piqued when she discovered that the library in Buckhannon (Buckhannon Public Library) where she lived had a lot of books that she was really interested in learning from. Through this activity, she became highly influenced by the likes of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.

Irene McKinney (April 20, 1939 – February 4, 2012) was an American poet and editor, and served as the Poet Laureate of the state of West Virginia from her appointment by Governor Gaston Caperton in January 1994 until her death.