Nick McRae is the author of Mountain Redemption, winner of the Fall 2011 Black River Chapbook Competition, as well the De Novo Prize-winning full-length The Name Museum (C&R Press, 2013). He is the editor of the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Publications, 2013). His poems, reviews, and translations appear in Cincinnati Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Linebreak, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems, poetry coordinator for the annual Best of the Net anthology, and is a member of the Sewanee Writers' Conference staff. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in the Northwest Georgia foothills, Nick earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at The Ohio State University and is currently a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas.

Books by Nick McRae:

Other poems on the web by Nick McRae:
"Killing a Rattler"
"Moravia"
"The Emigrant's Son"
Two poems
"Rabbit Tobacco"
"An E-mail from God Concerning the Recent Plague of Locusts"
"Exegesis (for Kids)"
"Persimmon"
"The Body: A Concise History of Burial"

Nick McRae's Website.

Nick McRae on Twitter.

About Mountain Redemption:

"In Nick McRae’s splendid Mountain Redemption, the contradictions of family and faith are hard to hold in balance. They are the fulcrum of a teeter totter that tips back and forth between passion and violence. But as he meditates on growing up in Georgia and the complexities of the faith he was born into, the poet himself is balanced, thoughtful, judicious—and loving. As he struggles to sustain that love, McRae sometimes borrows the cadences—large, passionate, and elegiac—of the prophets he knows so well: ‘Where, O Lord, is the home I only almost had— / mythic, bloody as a psalm in the mouths / of old and dying men who will take it / with them wholly when they go?’"
—Andrew Hudgins

"These rich and strange but familiar and American poems remind us that the roots of the American language are in Jacobean English, the English codified in the King James Authorized Version of the Bible—a text often quoted in this book. In every mark of dialect, in every turn of a country phrase, we still hear a language that Shakespeare and Jonson would have recognized. But the experience—what would they have made of that? It is familiar to us, it is authentic, and this latest rendering also reminds us that our language originally redeemed the heart and soul of English. Nick McRae’s book prods us with the memory of that redemption. It is one to treasure."
—Mark Jarman