Hey! Today I was featured on ABC Action News 6 in a Hometown Hero segment where I got to talk about painting, poetry and the arts as a vehicle for healing. Get a sneak peek at some of my art on display at the Dec. 9th, 2023 Open House! The show runs through Jan. 28th, with over 300 works by participating artists at all price points, so time to holiday shop!
Kelly McQuain, an English and creative writing professor at Community College of Philadelphia and a longtime fixture in the city’s LGBTQ art scene, is the Featured Artist for the 28th Annual International Art Ability Exhibit, a fundraiser for Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital in Malvern, PA, that kicks off with online artwork sales and an auction that begin at 6 pm on Oct. 28th. The show runs through Jan. 28th, 2024, and is open to the public during hospital visiting hours, noon to 8 pm seven days a week.
Poet and painter Kelly McQuain at work in his backyard studio near the Italian Market in Philadelphia, 2023.
McQuain sets a record for Featured Artist this year with a total of eight paintings chosen for the show. He considers the works “visual poems”, and his paintings feature icons inspired by folk art and symbolism drawn from the natural world. The themes in his work celebrate LGBTQ identity, the link between neurodivergence and creativity, and the interconnection of all life on earth. McQuain views art as a vehicle promoting empathy and healing, and he works hard to help his students discover such pleasures in their own creative work.
“Thoughts in Flight” by Kelly McQuain, 2023. Acrylic and mixed media. 24 x 20 inches. For sale through Art Ability.
Art Ability features work from artists across the globe who live with disabilities. McQuain, who lives with HNPP (Hereditary Neuropathy with Pressure Palsies), rare, genetic nerve disease, uses artmaking to stave off the gloom that can come from living with such afflictions. “I try to make peace with my condition and see what it can teach me,” he says. “Sometimes my hand will spasm and my brush will fling itself across the canvas, and I try to transform such surprises into happy accidents, especially in the initial stages of a painting, which often begins with a chaotic layering of colors and textures from which I later tease my final images. I try to let my paint, my brush and the process guide me to shape the work into what it wants to become.”
“Meeting the Bird King” by Kelly McQuain, 2023–The official Featured Image of the 28th Annual Art Ability Exhibit and Fundraiser for Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, part of Main Line Health System. 24 x 20 inches, Acrylic.
McQuain has also exhibited his work at the Barnes Collection, the National Liberty Museum, City Hall, and numerous galleries, and he has won awards in group shows at Cerulean Arts and Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Community Center.
One of McQuain’s paintings, “Meeting the Bird King”, will be auctioned off at another related event, a fundraising dinner Thursday, Nov. 2nd at the Phoenixville Foundry in Phoenixville. The exhibit itself is housed in Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital where healthcare workers use discussion of the art to help patients recover cognitive and verbal abilities. Private tours to learn more about Art Ability and its role in healing can be arranged by contacting Curator and Community Outreach Coordinator Erin Panner at PannerE@mlhs.org or 484.596.5607.
“Forest Goddess” by Kelly McQuain, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. A work from the 2023 Art Ability Exhibition.
McQuain’s newest poetry collection was published in 2023 by Texas University Press.
Earlier this year, McQuain’s poetry collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, was published by Texas Review Press as Winner of the Southern Breakthrough Award. In June, Philadelphia Magazine named the collection a “Best Book to Read.” The collection was completed while McQuain was an Artist in Residence at Millay Arts colony in Austerlitz, New York, and features poems inspired not only by Philadelphia but also the author’s home state of West Virginia and his travels across the globe from Spain to China. The poems originally appeared in publications that include The Philadelphia Inquirer, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Appalachian Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Kestrel, The Pinch and other journals. Some of the contributions won prizes judged by poets Dorianne Laux and C. Dale Young. One of the poems, “The Moon in Drag”, was showcased earlier this fall on Verse Daily. Prize-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral had this to say about the collection: “Kelly McQuain’s language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting’ but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain’s confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us.”
“My poetry infuses my painting, and my painting infuses my poetry,” states McQuain. “No matter the medium, I try to hint at the strange stories of the imagination, and I invite viewers as well as readers to share in the telling.”
“Pollination Dream” by Kelly McQuain is a painting that comments on neurodivergence and creativity, inspired by the overlapping of external and internal stimuli that characterizes ADHD perceptions of the world. While this sometimes makes focus hard for people with ADHD to stay on task, McQuain–who was diagnosed with the condition as an adult–believes that it can also be harnessed for creativity. McQuain states, “The overflow and competing information and sensory perception has often led me to new connections and insights I might not otherwise see. No matter what your health challenge is, it’s good to listen closely to it and mine it for whatever insights you can find. Gaining wisdom from illness is a step forward to making your peace with it.”
“My poetry infuses my painting, and my painting infuses my poetry,” states McQuain. “No matter the medium, I try to hint at the strange stories of the imagination, and I invite viewers as well as readers to share in the telling.”
“Who’s with Me?” by Kelly McQuain, 30 x 24 inches. This painting, inspired by folk art and the poet-painter’s personal mythology of symbols and figures celebrating communion with nature, is an example of how his works can be interpreted as one image from afar, but up close they become something else: an overlapping and interlocking puzzle of birds, fish, flowers, and hidden shapes. Can you spot the playful, folk art-inspired devil that emerges from between the white horse’s legs?
For More Information/Contacts Art Ability is on exhibition through January 28th, 2024 at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital at 414 Paoli Pike, Malvern, PA 19355. Artwork can be purchased online at the links here, and there are additional consignment items from artists from previous years that can be purchased as well. Visit the show seven days a week from noon to 8:00 pm during normal hospital visiting hours, and if you would like to schedule a private tour to learn more about the hospital’s innovative approach to using art to help patients heal, contact Erin Panner, Curator and Community Outreach Coordinator: PannerE@mlhs.org or 484.596.5607
For Art Ability media inquiries, contact Larry Hanover, Communications Manager, Main Line Health. 484.580.1186 | 609.315.1093 (c) HanoverL@mlhs.org
For more information on Professor McQuain’s poetry book: Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (Texas Review Press, 2023) For Review Copies and Publicity Information, Contact Karisma “Charlie” Tobin (she/her) Publishing Specialist, Texas Review Press: The University Press of SHSU. trp [@] shsu.edu, (936) 294-4307
To contact Kelly McQuain for interviews or commissions: KellyMcQuain.writer [@] gmail.com 215-287-6846
~ * ~ *** ~ * ~ More About the Book:
Kelly McQuain’s Debut Poetry Collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (2023), out now from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press
In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests, including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2020 and more. McQuain grew up in the mountains of West Virginia but now calls Philadelphia home. He works as a writer, a painter, and as a professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia. (From the publisher, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press)
Buy the Book: Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Texas Review Press is part of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium, so books can be ordered through the press at Texas A&M University Press. Scrape the Velvet From Your Antlers. Kelly McQuain. 978-1-68003-332-8 Paperback, Pub Date: 02/15/2023 Direct Media Inquiries & Review Copy Requests to: Texas Review Press (TRP, Publisher), P.O. Box 2146, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146 ~ * ~ Email trp@shsu.edu ~ * ~ Phone 936-294-1992
What Other Authors Are Saying About Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers the debut poetry collection by Kelly McQuain Winner of Texas Review Press’s Southern Breakthrough Award (With an Introduction by writer Jeff Mann, Professor of English, Virginia Tech)
Kelly McQuain’s language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting’ but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain’s confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us.” –Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
Kelly McQuain has written a book of poems both poignant and mesmerizing. The complexities of family relationships are examined here with a no-holds-barred frankness that makes it impossible not to recall the nearly overwhelming power of emotional dissonance in our own early lives. There is also an intricate look at how a burgeoning sexuality can further complicate entry into the world as we know it. However, the texture of these poems is wonderfully rich; McQuain’s poems have a cinematic quality that is hard to resist. I quickly found myself caught in the current of Scrape The Velvet from Your Antlers, feeling compelled to read just one more poem and then another and then just one more. –Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto.
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
“[H]ow easily the things we do go awry— / what can we // expect of truth / when we don’t dig for proof / or plumb its depth?” And digging for truth is what Kelly McQuain does in poem after beautiful poem in his moving collection Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers. The speaker in this book knows deeply the language of rural landscape and lives in the space where landscape and body merge. McQuain also understands grief and leaving, following the “[s]omething [that] calls you somewhere else.” These are generous poems, ravenous to love a broken world. Whether McQuain’s speaker is at a circuit party or trying to talk down a man who wants to jump from a bridge, there is a through line of tenderness, a lived-in melancholy. His longing becomes our longing. –Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~ McQuain’s poems stun with tenderness and revelation. The poet sings of burlap and corn silk, wolves and drag-queens, and the heart shuddering like unripe fruit against Dolly’s billowy chest as he confronts the accumulation and loss of this life while searching for a soft place to land. —Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~ Kelly McQuain’s wholehearted and powerful poems lead us into the valley of his making, with tales of a hardscrabble rural childhood and his “boyhood’s sweet undoing,” giving witness to a queer boy at once at home and in inner exile. But with all his tough-love exploration of the past, McQuain blazes his way to a new home, in a keenly rendered Philadelphia—and into the heady, trying truths of romantic love: “I’d drink your heart right now if I could,” he writes, “even if we were silver/and red/and made of tin.” Equally at ease in evocative narrative poems and the vivid, painterly lyric, McQuain invites us to set aside “the weight of this life undermined” and join him to “dream of constellations not yet named,/of ghosts, in reprieve, sent ascatter.” –David Groff, author of Clay
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~ Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers travels wondrously over verdant hills and down bustling city streets to find what matters: the gorgeous love, the all-consuming desire, the joy of human touch. This collection sings, pounds, and shouts. McQuain’s keen eye and sharp words command us to stop and see. Scrape the Velvet is a treat of a book, rendered by a man at the peak of his craft. –Jonathan Corcoran, author of The Rope Swing
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~ In Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, maturity is shown as a toughening process, a paring away of uncertainty. In the West Virginia of his childhood, McQuain finds himself a young gay man struggling against an alien and discriminatory culture. In elegant poems, so much of a place and time, he goes from the boy eager to please an exacting father intent on building a house, to the Good Samaritan in the big city where he has landed, stopping in traffic to talk a would-be suicide down from a bridge. In lyrical lines that stretch out where they need to, never losing momentum, he blends a Keatsian sweetness with the street smarts of a Frank O’Hara. “As you take the hill, the hill takes you.” It is “stubbled with stubborn flowers,” the deer he views, “a blister/ of orange-red and velvet need.” And in the lush final poem, the simple feast of Italian ices from a South Philly vendor that the poet shares in bed with his lover one hot summer night he rightly names “this moment/ a victory.” —Elaine Terranvova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir and Damages.
~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~ About the Author Mr. Kelly McQuain Associate Prof. of English, Community College of Philadelphia Twitter: @kellymcquain Instagram: @kmcqusin Email: KellyMcQuain.writer [at] gmail.com (email the author directly for readings, interviews, or artwork commissions) http://www.kelllymcquain.wordpress.com
Kelly McQuain is the author of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (2023), a poetry collection chosen by Texas Review Press for the Southern Breakthrough Award. He has also authored two chapbooks, Velvet Rodeo, which won the Bloom chapbook poetry prize, and Antlers, chosen for the Editors Series at Seven Kitchens Press. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Best American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Spunk, Assaracus, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as: Best New Poets 2020; Men on Men; Drawn to Marvel; LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia; Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia; The Queer South; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems; and Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology. Other honors include poet Dorianne Laux’s selection of his poem, “Ruby on Fire”, for Limp Wrist Magazine’s annual Glitter Bomb Award, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and selection as a Tennessee Williams Scholar by the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. As an Assoc. Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, McQuain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the East-West Center of Hawaii, which led to his selection for a field study and research trip sponsored by the Freeman Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Education, which took him from Beijing to Shanghai and many points in between. His travels greatly influence his painting and writing, and he takes joy in sharing his love of the arts with his students.
I got a great shout-out this Pride Month! A big thank you to Suzi Nash at the Philadelphia Gay News for interviewing me about my book, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers! https://epgn.com/2023/06/02/kelly-mcquain-pure-poetry/
Great News from Philadelphia Magazine: “Scrape the Velvet From Your Antlers” by Kelly McQuain. The longtime Philly poet released his debut collection earlier this year. McQuain’s verse is wonderfully precise even as it explores life’s grim and gray areas. Lovely.” –The Best Books to Read This Summer, Philadelphia Magazinehttps://www.phillymag.com/things-to-do/2023/05/25/best-books-philly-summer-2023/
out now from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press
In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests, including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000and more. McQuain grew up in the mountains of West Virginia but now calls Philadelphia home. He works as a writer, a painter, and as a professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia. (From the publisher, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press)
Buy the Book: Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Texas Review Press is part of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium, so books can be ordered through the press at Texas A&M University Press.
–Saturday 3/11/2023 11 pm – Noon — Signing at Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art, table #1300.
–And I will be reading Friday at 7:00 at Underbelly in Seattle, free and open to all. The reading will start at 7:30 or so and I will read after 8:00. “We’re the Flownover” at Underbelly at 8:00 Friday. 119 1st Ave S, Seattle, WA, United States, Washington Duration: 2 hr Join us for a poetry and prose reading featuring new work from Trio House Press, Gold Wake Press, Minnesota Historical Society Press, the South Dakota Review, and Texas Review Press!
From Trio House Press: David Groff Matt Mauch Jen Manthey From Gold Wake Press: Laura Bandy From MN Historical Society Press: Lynette Reini-Grandell From South Dakota Review: Lee Ann Roripaugh Jan Beatty See less From Texas Review Press: Kelly McQuain
Kelly McQuain’s Debut Poetry Collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, out now from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press
In questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests, including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000and more. (From the publisher, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press)
Book Cover: Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers by Kelly McQuain
Buy the Book: Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Texas Review Press is part of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium, so books can be ordered through the press at Texas A&M University Press.
Scrape the Velvet From Your Antlers. Kelly McQuain. 978-1-68003-332-8 Paperback, Pub Date: 02/15/2023
Direct Media Inquiries & Review Copy Requests to: Texas Review Press (TRP, Publisher), P.O. Box 2146, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146 ~ * ~ Email trp@shsu.edu ~ * ~ Phone 936-294-1992
You can also contact Kelly McQuain directly at the links at the end of this announcement.
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“Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers”
As you take the hill, the hill takes you— raking you and your siblings into a grassy sway of beetles and spiders moving, and the day’s hot ricochet of blue bottle flies and bees gone crazy in their looping. Your brother and sister run to catch the horizon. You wade slowly through the lashing, alive with combustion, eager for bursting…
Excerpt from the title poem, originally published in Kestrel.
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Advance Praise from Writers
Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers the debut poetry collection by Kelly McQuain
Winner of Texas Review Press’s Southern Breakthrough Award
Kelly McQuain’s language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting’ but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain’s confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us.”
–Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
Kelly McQuain has written a book of poems both poignant and mesmerizing. The complexities of family relationships are examined here with a no-holds-barred frankness that makes it impossible not to recall the nearly overwhelming power of emotional dissonance in our own early lives. There is also an intricate look at how a burgeoning sexuality can further complicate entry into the world as we know it. However, the texture of these poems is wonderfully rich; McQuain’s poems have a cinematic quality that is hard to resist. I quickly found myself caught in the current of Scrape The Velvet from Your Antlers, feeling compelled to read just one more poem and then another and then just one more.
–Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto.
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
“[H]ow easily the things we do go awry— / what can we // expect of truth / when we don’t dig for proof / or plumb its depth?” And digging for truth is what Kelly McQuain does in poem after beautiful poem in his moving collection Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers. The speaker in this book knows deeply the language of rural landscape and lives in the space where landscape and body merge. McQuain also understands grief and leaving, following the “[s]omething [that] calls you somewhere else.” These are generous poems, ravenous to love a broken world. Whether McQuain’s speaker is at a circuit party or trying to talk down a man who wants to jump from a bridge, there is a through line of tenderness, a lived-in melancholy. His longing becomes our longing.
–Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
McQuain’s poems stun with tenderness and revelation. The poet sings of burlap and corn silk, wolves and drag-queens, and the heart shuddering like unripe fruit against Dolly’s billowy chest as he confronts the accumulation and loss of this life while searching for a soft place to land.
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
Kelly McQuain’s wholehearted and powerful poems lead us into the valley of his making, with tales of a hardscrabble rural childhood and his “boyhood’s sweet undoing,” giving witness to a queer boy at once at home and in inner exile. But with all his tough-love exploration of the past, McQuain blazes his way to a new home, in a keenly rendered Philadelphia—and into the heady, trying truths of romantic love: “I’d drink your heart right now if I could,” he writes, “even if we were silver/and red/and made of tin.” Equally at ease in evocative narrative poems and the vivid, painterly lyric, McQuain invites us to set aside “the weight of this life undermined” and join him to “dream of constellations not yet named,/of ghosts, in reprieve, sent ascatter.”
–David Groff, author of Clay
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers travels wondrously over verdant hills and down bustling city streets to find what matters: the gorgeous love, the all-consuming desire, the joy of human touch. This collection sings, pounds, and shouts. McQuain’s keen eye and sharp words command us to stop and see. Scrape the Velvet is a treat of a book, rendered by a man at the peak of his craft.
–Jonathan Corcoran, author of The Rope Swing
~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~
In Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, maturity is shown as a toughening process, a paring away of uncertainty. In the West Virginia of his childhood, McQuain finds himself a young gay man struggling against an alien and discriminatory culture. In elegant poems, so much of a place and time, he goes from the boy eager to please an exacting father intent on building a house, to the Good Samaritan in the big city where he has landed, stopping in traffic to talk a would-be suicide down from a bridge. In lyrical lines that stretch out where they need to, never losing momentum, he blends a Keatsian sweetness with the street smarts of a Frank O’Hara. “As you take the hill, the hill takes you.” It is “stubbled with stubborn flowers,” the deer he views, “a blister/ of orange-red and velvet need.” And in the lush final poem, the simple feast of Italian ices from a South Philly vendor that the poet shares in bed with his lover one hot summer night he rightly names “this moment/ a victory.”
—Elaine Terranvova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir and Damages.
Kelly McQuain is the author of Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers (2023), a poetry collection chosen by Texas Review Press for the Southern Breakthrough Award. He has also authored two chapbooks, Velvet Rodeo, which won the Bloom chapbook poetry prize, and Antlers, chosen for the Editors Series at Seven Kitchens Press. His prose, poetry and illustrations have appeared in The Pinch, Best American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Spunk, Assaracus, Kestrel, and Cleaver, as well as such anthologies as: Best New Poets 2020; Men on Men; Drawn to Marvel; LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia; Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia; The Queer South; Rabbit Ears: TV Poems; and Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology. Other honors include poet Dorianne Laux’s selection of his poem, “Ruby on Fire”, for Limp Wrist Magazine’s annual Glitter Bomb Award, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and selection as a Tennessee Williams Scholar by the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop. As a visual artist, McQuain has won prizes from the Barnes Foundation and Philadelphia’s William Way LGBTQ Center, and his series of writer portraits appear as cover illustrations on Fjords Review. As an Assoc. Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, McQuain has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the East-West Center of Hawaii, which led to his selection for a field study and research trip sponsored by the Freeman Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Education, which took him from Beijing to Shanghai and many points in between. His travels greatly influence his painting and writing, and he takes joy in sharing his love of the arts with his students.
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“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Some good news! My first full-length poetry collection has been accepted by Texas Review Press (see the first link in the comments). My book was chosen for their Southern Breakthrough Series, a contest that seeks new works from a different southern state each year. My collection, titled Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, was chosen to represent WV, my home state. The title refers to something bucks do to harden their antlers in anticipation of the fighting come mating season. This is my first full-length book, a longstanding dream of mine! The book will debut in February 2023. My thanks to TRP, all the editors who first published these poems, and especially the editors at Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, where the title poem first appeared (thanks Donna Long, @Elizabeth Savage, Suzanne Heagy). #poetry
I am long overdue in sharing this good writers news: My chapbook, Antlers, was selected by #SevenKitchensPress for their Editor’s Series. Much thanks to editor Ron Mohring for his hard work on this project. The chapbooks are painstakingly crafted and stitched by hand in a very limited quantity. More writing news is coming soon! Details on how to order the chapbook are here: https://sevenkitchenspress.com/2022/01/29/kelly-mcquain-antler-editors-series/
I was over the moon this April to learn I won the first annual Glitter Bomb Award from poet Dustin Brookshire’s Limp Wrist magazine. The contest was judged by Pulitzer Prize Finalist Dorianne Laux, whom I greatly admire, and it came with a $500 prize. Issue 3 is live now with three of my poems, including the award-winning “Ruby on Fire”. Click here to read it.
Just in time for Christmas! Bumble is happy that I have a poem in the newly arrived Best New Poets 2020 anthology! Special thanks to editor Brian Teare and series editor Jeb Livingood for having faith in my poem, “The Moon in Drag”.
Two of my paintings are featured in a new show at the Philadelphia National Liberty Museum. See the details below.
On view October 16, 2020 – February 13, 2021 10:00AM – 7:00PM (Special priority access for seniors and immunocompromised individuals from 10-11AM each day.) Click here for location and details.
Diverse Voices. One City.
How do we define “liberty”? What does it mean to be “free”? These are questions and concepts that we have grappled with at the National Liberty Museum for more than 20 years and ones we posed to a group of talented artists from across Philadelphia in our newest exhibition, Philly’s Freedom.
Through more than 75 works of art, Philly’s Freedom invites you on a journey to explore what freedom means to 50+ artists as they use stories, reflections, and images to inspire us to see freedom and liberty as an ongoing human quest we all share.
This month I had some wonderful poetry news. A poem of mine, “The Moon in Drag” will appear in the anthology series Best New Poets 2020. I’ll post more about it when the anthology comes out. Also, another poem, “The Walk” was recently featured in the online journal Trampset. You can read it here.
About the Artist: Kelly McQuain grew up surrounded by the lush mountains of West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. This proved a rich source of inspiration for his artistic imagination and his development of a style influenced by folk art and laden with evocative symbolism.
These works in watercolor and acrylic reflect the artist’s practice of layering paint in different ways. “Whether on canvas or paper, I generally start a work with abstract layers of color laid down in soft washes,” McQuain states. “Then I tease out different forms based on how the washes speak to me. I try to let old layers peek through as I add new ones, conjuring figures and tiny details. It’s not my goal to transcribe nature in a realistic way. Rather, I try to find the essence of a thing and use dreamlike imagery to convey its spirit.”
Take a virtual tour below!
Video tour of Grasshopper Gallery art show featuring work by Kelly McQuain, Summer 2020.
“Never Stop Dreaming” Kelly McQuain
The result is a body of work rich with enchanting motifs. In some portraits, for instance, tiny robots appear, hinting at humankind’s need to reconcile life with technology and ever-advancing artificial intelligence. In other works, like “Fox Birds Hiding in the Brush”, a mash-up of birds and animals appear. Floral shapes also abound, evoking the exotica of the imagination as well as the wildflowers of McQuain’s youth. While McQuain is adept at painting human and animal forms, he often uses silhouettes to suggest the iconic power of his subjects. “Shape and pattern are as important to me as the richness of my colors,” McQuain notes. “I like images that pop, that have a sense of mystery and playfulness about them, that hint at stories.”
McQuain’s work hangs in many private collections. He recently displayed works at the Barnes Collection and the William Way Center in Philadelphia, the latter of which awarded him a showcase exhibit. His three-dimensional work celebrating the 200th birthday of poet Walt Whitman is currently on display at the Free Library of Philadelphia. McQuain’s portraits of writers appear regularly on the cover of the literary journal, Fjords Review—reflecting another interest of his: poetry. As a writer, McQuain’s poems have appeared in scores of national journals, and his poetry chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won the Bloom prize. McQuain works as a professor of creative writing in Philadelphia when he’s not visiting family and friends in his home state.
Kelly McQuain 