McFee, Michael

Michael McFee was born in Asheville, N.C., on 4 June 1954. He received an A.B. (1976) and M.A. (1978) in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught at the University since 1984. McFee has published collections of poetry, served as assistant editor for poetry at DoubleTake magazine, and was coordinator of the Second Sunday Reading Series in Chapel Hill.

Michael McFee was born in Asheville, N.C., on 4 June 1954 andgrew up in the small town of Arden in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 with an A.B. in English with highest honors in creative writing. He received an M.A. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1978. McFee served as poetry editor for Carolina Quarterly while attending graduate school. After completing his degree, he became book editor for Spectator magazine in Raleigh, N.C., and book commentator for WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill. Throughout that time, McFee was writing poems and submitting them for publication in various magazines. Since the late 1970s, his work has appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly .

McFee has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1984. He started in that year as visiting lecturer in Creative Writing and, in 2002, became professor of English. He also served as visiting assistant professor of English at Cornell University and Lawrence University. During those two decades, he published six collections of poetry.

McFee has spent his professional career supporting and promoting North Carolina literature. He edited an anthology of contemporary North Carolina poetry in 1994 and compiled an anthology of short stories by North Carolina writers six years later. In 1996, McFee became coordinator of the Second Sunday Reading Series, a series started by author Doris Betts to bring writers with North Carolina roots to Chapel Hill.

McFee has won numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and writing, including a Discovery/ The Nation Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing. He lives in Durham, N.C.