Maureen N. McLane

Maureen McLane (born December 24, 1967) is an American poet, critic, and professor.

She received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

McLane was raised in upstate New York.

She holds degrees from Harvard University, University of Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar), and University of Chicago.

She is the author of four books of poetry, including This Blue.

McLane's first full-length poetry collection (Same Life: poems, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and The Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award.

It was named as one of the Chicago Tribune Literary Editor's Best Books.

Her follow-up book, World Enough: poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), was selected by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker as a best poetry book of the year.

McLane achieved literary celebrity with the publication of her hybrid criticism-biography My Poets, which Paris Review editor Lorin Stein called "the survey course of my dreams."

My Poets was lauded in The New York Times, NPR, Bookforum, New York Observer, Boston Globe, and elsewhere for its groundbreaking hybridity.

Writing in Bookforum, Parul Sehgal remarked that "To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she's at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy."

My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

McLane is also a contributing editor at Boston Review and poetry editor at Grey.

She is currently professor of English at New York University.