The Readiness

Rennie McQuilkin was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 to 2018. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his 25th collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, six fellowships frm the CT Commission on the Arts, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Center for the Book. In 2010 his volume of new and selected poems, The Weathering, was awarded the Center's annual poetry prize under the aegis of the Library of Congress; and in 2018, North of Eden received the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Poetry. For nine years he directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he co-founded and directed for many years at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. In 2018, he and his wife of sixty-two years - artist, teacher, counselor, and gardener Sarah McQuilkin - moved to the Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield, CT. Sadly, Sarah passed away in January of 2023.