Remembering Irene McKinney
Women writers, and all who write about the working class and farmers and miners of Appalachia, lost a sterling voice over the weekend. Irene McKinney, former poet laureate of the state, teacher, editor, and light in the darkness, died February 4 , on her family farm. She was only a few weeks shy of her 73 rd birthday. The daughter of a schoolteacher, she grew up in Belington, WV, and returned to those acres after a life that took her first to West Virginia Wesleyan College, just down the road, then West Virginia University, and finally the University of Utah. She traveled widely beyond those academic settings, but her heart was always home. “I’m a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” she once said, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” But people listened. She gathered up honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the