Obituary for Irene McKinney

From the Talbott Funeral Home, 2014

Doctor Irene Durrett McKinney, Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 1994, passed away on February 4, 2012, on her family farm and birthplace in Belington, West Virginia after surviving with cancer for eight years surrounded by family and friends.

Dr. McKinney was born April 20, 1939 and graduated from Belington High School in 1956. She went on to receive degrees from West Virginia Wesleyan College (BA), West Virginia University (MA), and the University of Utah (PhD). Professor Emerita of West Virginia Wesleyan College, McKinney was widely respected regionally and nationally as a poet, scholar, and teacher.

In addition to numerous publications in literary journals and magazines, McKinney is the author of six books of poetry: The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (North Atlantic Books, 1976), The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (Small Plot Press, 1982), Quick Fire and Slow Fire (North Atlantic Books, 1988), Six O’Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), Vivid Companion (West Virginia University Press, 2004), and Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009). Her forthcoming collection of poetry, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? No, I Haven’t Had Enough Darkness, will be published posthumously in 2013 by Red Hen Press.

McKinney also edited Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (Vandalia Press, 2002) and was coeditor with Maggie Anderson and Winston Fuller of the literary magazine Trellis from 1973 to 1979. Since 2006, McKinney has had a popular radio commentary on National Public Radio; her poems have been featured on Michael Feldman’s What Do You Know?, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage. McKinney’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Blue Mountain Center. She also received a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry, and Potomac State College of West Virginia University named her a 2005 Whitmore-Gates Scholar.

McKinney was Writer-in-Residence at many colleges and universities, including Western Washington University in Bellingham, the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and Lynchburg College in Virginia. In the last three years of her life, she founded and directed the Low Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Daughter of the late Ralph and Celia Phares Durrett, Irene McKinney was married to Joseph McKinney of Fort Ashby, West Virginia, from 1956 to 1973. She is survived by her daughter, Julia Vickers, of Germantown, Maryland, and her son, Paul McKinney, of Santa Cruz, California. She is also survived by her five siblings: Harold Durrett and his wife, Betty, of Harrisonburg, Virginia; Eleanor Leary and her husband, Edward, of Elkins, West Virginia; Ralph Waldo Durrett of Route 1 Belington; Janet Stonerook of Route 1 Belington; and Eileen Martin of Clyde, Ohio. She had fourteen nieces and nephews.

Notes of condolence may be sent to West Virginia Wesleyan College c/o Dr. Boyd Creasman, Division Chair, English Department, 59 College Avenue, Buckhannon, WV 26201. A fund in her memory, the Irene McKinney Award for West Virginia Wesleyan MFA Students, has been established at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Donations can be made to the West Virginia Wesleyan College Irene McKinney Award at the same address. Donations to Mountain Hospice in Irene McKinney’s name would also be appreciated.

Friends will be received at the Talbott Funeral Home 210 Brandenburg Street in Belington, WV. 26250 from 4-9pm on Tuesday February 7th, 2012 and again on Wednesday from 8am until 11am when a celebration of her life will be conducted from the funeral home chapel with the Professor Emeritus Maggie Anderson bringing the eulogy . Interment will follow in the Talbott Cemetery near Belington .Condolences can be sent to the family at www.talbottfuneralhome.com .