Clint McCown has published four novels (The Member-Guest, War Memorials, The Weatherman, and Haints), and four previous volumes of poems (Labyrinthiad, Sidetracks, Wind Over Water, and Dead Languages). He has received the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, and a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association. He is the only two-time recipient of the American Fiction Prize. In journalism, he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime. He has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and a Creative Consultant for HBO television. He is a former principal actor with the National Shakespeare Company, and several of his plays have been produced. He has edited a number of literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Books by Clint McCown:

Other poems on the web by Clint McCown:
"A Note to My Daughters, Far Away"
"Total Balance Farm"

About Total Balance Farm:

"Clint McCown's meditative locale is a menagerie of hawks and hummingbirds, eagles and turtles, a wife's idle boot and the brown recluse who'll find uneasy home in it. Through philosophers Greek and ruralist, McCown finds terror in beauty and beauty in the terrified ones adrift in earth's vertiginous sway. The poet leaves us always a step removed from steady, hankering for balance. There, tethered in fear's 'inmost cave,' menace and penance preside—all our human 'complaints' loom amid the uncertain gift of 'feathers.'"
—Kevin Stein

"In this marvelous collection of poems by one of our very best storytellers, time slows like the light does at the end of the day. Nature drives a hard bargain. We milk a dead cow to save her newborn calf. No matter how deep the fence posts were set, the soil loosens. 'Experience speaks a language / all its own.' Our mortality is everywhere. In contemplation, 'we are the universe / asking itself a question.' And it's a bitter truth, Clint McCown's wisdom, his sweet wisdom."
—Ralph Angel

"Clint McCown's new book of poetry delves into the unruly world of nature, not as a guide or simply as scenery, but with the steady gaze of the late John Haines. Here nature, family, and selfhood are not just talked about but explored and questioned."
—Matthew Dickman

"I read Total Balance Farm with real pleasure. This is a fine book steeped in hard work and even harder questions. Using precise depictions of the natural world and honest portrayals of human ambition, these poems perceptively consider our mysteries and our limitations. 'Thinking is the only voice I own,' McCown writes, but he also sings with a rough and seasoned music; that ear, coupled with his rich narrative gifts and his keen wit, make for an engaging, artful, greatly rewarding experience."
—Mark Cox