Cameron McGill is a poet, educator, and songwriter originally from Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of In the Night Field (Augury Books/Brooklyn Arts Press) and Meridians (Willow Springs Books). His poems are forthcoming in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Willow Springs. In 2022, he released his seventh studio album, The Widow Cameron. He serves as poetry faculty in the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University and as Associate Professor at Washington State University, where he co-directs the Visiting Writers Series and a poetry study abroad to Ireland. 

From the author’s Statement of Purpose: Poetry, for me, is this practice of attention across time and an empathetic way of being in the world.

My work maps the emotional coordinates of physical locations as a way of making legible the intimate regions of memory. There is an exchange in my poems between the present-day speaker and the younger self, which creates a liminal space for exploring memories from different points of view. In my poetic practice, I am guided by the emotional subtext which inhabits images, figurative language, and music of the line. As there is never a 1:1 ratio between memory and our emotional response, my poems often arrive at their understanding through a balancing of narrative and the surreal. Some of what I could not process as a child is retained as bodily memory, un-dischargeable. These poems embrace that embodiment, whether they are exploring mortality and grief through the elegy, reframing home through the lens of familial trauma and mental health, or triangulating the self and place with the end of a long-term relationship. These poems move toward an understanding of what I may hold and that which I can let go. As an artist, I believe memories can be a corrective, carrying back to us occasions for instruction, reconciliation, or, in certain flashes of clarity, what again might be loved or newly understood.

In my work as an educator, I direct the WSU Visiting Writers Series, which brings poets and writers to campus for public readings and collaborative exchanges across intellectual and artistic disciplines. This work is close to my heart, my poetic practice, and my commitment to supporting the arts in my community.