David McKain, 1937–2017

January 5, 2018

David McKain, author of the memoir Spellbound: Growing Up in God’s Country, which won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction in 1988 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a PEN award, passed away on December 27, 2017. He was seventy-nine. The Bradford Erareported that he had long suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

McKain’s other books include three collections of poems, In Touch, The Common Life, and Spirit Bodies. He also edited The Whole Earth: Essays in Appreciation, Anger, and Hope and Christianity: Some Non-Christian Appraisals. His work earned him grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission for the Arts.

He taught for thirty years for the University of Connecticut, at its Avery Point and Storrs campuses, and also served as writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, the Phillips Academy in Andover, and at Virginia Commonwealth University.