Rennie McQuilkin grew up in Pittsford, New York, received Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in history and English from Princeton and Columbia Universities, and decided against a career in law after a stint at Harvard Law School. He taught English and often directed theatrical productions at Horace Mann School; Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; Schoolboys Abroad in Rennes, France; as well as the Loomis-Chaffee School and Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. Rennie was Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2015 to 2018. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. This is his 26th poetry collection. He has received a number of awards for his work, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, six fellowships from the Connecticut 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. He co-founded and for many years directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. In 2018, Rennie and his wife of sixty-two years - artist, teacher, counselor, gardener, and gourmet cook Sarah McQuilkin - moved to the Seabury retirement community in Bloomfield, CT. Sadly, Sarah passed away in January of 2023.
