Ray McManus

Ray McManus grew up on a dirt road in rural South Carolina in a working class, Irish-American family. Bored and angry, McManus found poetry by accident while serving detention in high school. According to McManus, he just happened to be sitting at the desk when the teacher placed an anthology of poetry in front of him. “I didn’t grow up with poetry in my house, so that book was really my first introduction to so many great poets: Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, etc. I loved that book so much that I stole it.” When asked how he went from delinquency to writing poetry, McManus shrugs, “it was the same for me, especially at first. All my early poems were acts of vandalism. I left poems in margins of books I didn’t own, bathroom walls, desks.”

At 43, McManus’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His poems can be quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes quite dark, often all at the same time. His first book, _Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born_, was selected by Southern poet Kate Daniels and published by USC Press in 2007. Since then he has gone on to publish three more books: _Left Behind_ (a chapbook published by Stepping Stones Press in 2008), _Red Dirt Jesus_ (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and published by Marick Press in 2011), and _Punch._ (published by Hub City Press in 2014, and winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award). McManus has recently co-edited an anthology called _Found Anew_ with notable contributors with South Carolina ties such as Terrance Hayes, George Singleton, Pam Durban, Nikky Finney, John Lane, Mark Powell, and Jillian Weise.

Although McManus’s books seem placed in the semi-rural and sometimes repressive Southern culture of the Carolinas, where the laughter or worse silence of others “is the threat that keeps us moving forward,” there are also repeated themes about the haunting presence of Ireland and the past – or more precisely, that imagination that exists in family story, immigrant memory, and personal history. There is a toughness, a muscular violence, in his landscapes, punctuated by tenderness and curiosity. McManus’s work explores themes that wrestle with loss, faith, denial, and rebellion, the narratives of hope and the heroics of failure – themes that touch the bone of Southern identity. His latest book, _Punch._, is very much a book about the working class, the grit and grime that hammers at the once romantic ideal of the South, and perhaps out of all of McManus’s work, it is the most autobiographical.

Ray McManus earned his MFA in poetry and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of South Carolina. An Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Sumter, McManus teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Southern Literature, and directs the Center for Oral Narrative – a center for oral histories, digital and oral storytelling, spoken word, and dramatic literatures. McManus is also the founder of Split P Soup, a creative writing outreach program that places writers in schools and communities in South Carolina, and the director of the creative writing program at the Tri-District Arts Consortium. His current outreach project, Re:Verse, is a teaching initiative that works with teachers and administrators on developing effective strategies for bringing creative writing back to a standard curriculum.

McManus lives in Lexington, South Carolina, with his wife Lindsay and their three children: Sean, Morgan, and Lennon.