Time to Connect Episode #79 - Kerrin McCadden - November 26, 2024

Thanks so much to the Vermont poet Kerrin McCadden for a really fun conversation. Kerrin is the author of two books of poetry, "American Wake" (2021) and "Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes" (2014), as well as a chapbook, "Keep This to Yourself" (2020). She’s currently working on a new collection. Kerrin is the recipient of many fellowships and awards (the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and many more). She holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at the Center for Technology, Essex. A dual citizen of Ireland and the U.S., Kerrin lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
In this conversation, we talk briefly about other poets (Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Charles Bukowski, and Seamus Heaney), Kerrin’s biography, how she discovered her Irish roots and relatives relatively late in life, her poems "American Wake" and "Time," telling the bees about death, teaching high school students, the challenges and opportunities of AI, music Kerrin likes, her fascination with Neanderthals, guilty pleasures, Neil Diamond, the recent election, death and our “last first start,” the element of surprise in poetry, and many more things. Kerrin was kind enough to read several of her poems.
Check out Kerrin here: www.kerrinmcca...
Time to Connect theme music (“So Long”) by Krajicek & Shafer, from the album Blue Midwestern Dream (Borderline Social Club).