Maureen N. McLane

Maureen N. McLane studied at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Chicago, where she received a PhD in English in 1997.

McLane is the author of the poetry collections What You Want (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2019); Some Say (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award; World Enough (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); and Same Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

McLane is also known for her work in literary criticism and scholarship, focusing on British Romanticism and the history of English poetry. She co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and is the author of Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008), as well as the hybrid book of memoir and criticism My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. 

McLane has previously taught at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the East Harlem Poetry Project, and she served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2007 to 2010. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing and a Rhodes Scholarship. She currently serves as a professor of literature at New York University and lives in New York City.