Kelly McQuain is an artist and writer who teaches creative writing in Philadelphia. His 2023 poetry collection, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers, won Texas Review Press's Southern Breakthrough Award and features LGBTQ poems inspired by his home state of West Virginia as well as his travels to such locales as Spain, Mexico, France, China, and the Czech Republic. His poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Pinch, as well as many anthologies, including Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). His recent honors include winning the first Glitter Bomb Award for his poem "Ruby on Fire", selected by Dorianne Laux. McQuain is a strong believer in the healing power of art. As a painter, he was recently selected as the Featured Artist for the 28th Annual International Art Ability Show, a celebration of artists with disabilities that benefits Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital in Malvern, PA.

Books by Kelly McQuain:

Other poems on the web by Kelly McQuain:
"The Absinthe Drinker"
"The Walk"
"Lent"

Kelly McQuain's Website.

Kelly McQuain on Twitter.

About Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers:

"Kelly McQuain's language—exact, thrilling, exquisite—isolates the contradictions inherent in family, in our society. Queerness, here, is an ‘ache of wanting' but also bewilderment, dangerous, messy, curious, and, finally, hard-won love—a bond to a man who brings home strawberries. Too often, in our era of easy oversharing and spectacle, we scroll past human utterances. But McQuain's confessional poems stopped me in my tracks, brought me closer to what divides us, to what tethers us."
—Eduardo C. Corral

"Kelly McQuain's wholehearted and powerful poems lead us into the valley of his making, with tales of a hardscrabble rural childhood and his 'boyhood's sweet undoing,' giving witness to a queer boy at once at home and in inner exile. But with all his tough-love exploration of the past, McQuain blazes his way to a new home, in a keenly rendered Philadelphia—and into the heady, trying truths of romantic love: 'I'd drink your heart right now if I could,' he writes, 'even if we were silver/and red/and made of tin.' Equally at ease in evocative narrative poems and the vivid, painterly lyric, McQuain invites us to set aside 'the weight of this life undermined' and join him to 'dream of constellations not yet named,/of ghosts, in reprieve, sent ascatter."
—David Groff