Richard McCann (1949-2021) was a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He was long associated with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and was a longtime professor in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C. McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a collection of linked stories that novelist Michael Cunningham has described as “almost unbearably beautiful.” It won the 2005 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and was also an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award recipient, as well as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Amazon named it one of the Top 50 Books of 2005. McCann's book of poems, Ghost Letters, won the 1994 Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Poetry awards.
With Michael Klein, he edited Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Ms., Tin House, Ploughshares, and numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, Best American Essays 2000, and The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the Yaddo Corporation. In 2010, he was the master artist at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL.
At the time of his death, he was completing a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meaning of illness and mortality through a narrative about his experience as a liver transplant recipient. His essay, “The Resurrectionist,” was selected for Best American Essays 2000.
“His essay on his liver transplant, ‘The Resurrectionist,’ is still, I think, one of the most stunning essays I’ve ever read,” wrote Michael Klein in The Provincetown Independent. “I teach it every semester, as a way to illustrate how imagination is still essential, even in nonfiction. To imagine, as he imagines in that essay, who the person is who has to die in order for him to continue his own living, is so humbling and moving and, for me, is a key to who Richard was as a whole person: curious, restless, hysterically funny, but also sad. And that sadness only enlarged his magnanimous, beating heart.”
Portrait by Sigrid Estrada
