McCann, Richard

American author Richard McCann is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Richard John McCann was born in 1949 to Richard Joseph McCann (1910–1961) and Marie Dolores McCann Key (née Perazzo, 1913–1998). He attended Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Maryland, earned his BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, an MA in Creative Writing and Modern Literature from Hollins College, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. McCann taught film history, film theory, and American literature for the University of Maryland European Division on U.S. military bases in Spain, Italy, and Germany. In 1982–1983, he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Göteborgs universitet in Sweden.

Richard McCann has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, on whose board of trustees he served from 2000–2008. He serves on the board of directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a member of the Corporation of Yaddo.

Beginning in the mid–1980s, McCann devoted himself to creative writing, though he also continued to teach and write reviews. In 1994, he wrote Ghost Letters, a collection of poems and winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award and Capricorn Poetry Award. In the same year his work Nights of 1990 was published. In 1997, McCann published Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, which gathered the works of poets whose writings have been affected by the AIDS epidemic.

His fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Ms. Magazine, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Nation, and Washington Post Magazine , as well as numerous anthologies such as Best American Essays 2000, The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, Contemporary Writers on Childhood, and Worlds of Fiction . This includes the group of interconnected stories that came together to form the 2005 novel, Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction based partially on his own family life and experiences growing up in 1950s Maryland. "The Resurrectionist," McCann's memoir exploring his 1996 experience as an organ transplant recipient, is a work in progress.

"Richard McCann." http://www.richardmccann.net/about.php (accessed March 25, 2010). Biographical information derived from the collection.

From the guide to the Richard McCann papers, 1920s–2008, 1978–2005, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)