Rebecca McClanahan's twelfth book, Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter's Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility, is forthcoming in March 2026. She is the author of eleven previous books, including In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays and a revised edition of Word Painting: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively, which has sold more than 50,000 copies and is used as a text in several writing programs. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Sun, and in anthologies published by Doubleday, Norton, Putnam, Penguin Random House, Beacon, St. Martin's, and numerous other publishers.
Recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Wood Prize from Poetry, and the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction for The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, she has also received a MacDowell Colony fellowship, four literary fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, and the N.C. Governor's Award for Excellence in Education for her work in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Poetry-in-the Schools program, among other honors and awards.
Rebecca currently teaches nonfiction and poetry in the MFA program of Queens University. She has served as Writer-in-Residence at Hollins College and on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference, The Writer's Voice in New York City, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Flatiron Writers room, Charlotte Lit, and numerous other programs. She also leads workshops, serves on panels, and conducts readings and talks in public schools, universities and colleges, libraries, writing centers, and other venues throughout the country.
TO INQUIRE ABOUT READINGS, TALKS, WORKSHOPS, INTERVIEWS OR MEDIA EVENTS, CONTACT REBECCA
AWARDS & HONORS
• Nonfiction Literature Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts• Literature fellowships in nonfiction and poetry, North Carolina Arts Council
• Wood Prize from Poetry magazine
• Work selected for Pushcart Prize anthology
• P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award
• Work selected for The Best American Essays and The Best American Essays College Edition; five essays listed as "Notable" in Best American Essay series
• Work selected for The Best American Poetry series
• Glasgow Prize for The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings
• Twice awarded the Carter Prize for the Essay from Shenandoah
• MacDowell Colony Residency
• Bread Loaf Scholarship
• Raab Award in Nonfiction,Santa Barbara Community College
• AWP Award finalist for unpublished manuscript, Coming of (a Certain) Age in New York City
• North Carolina Governor's Award for Excellence in Education
REBECCA LITE (a personal bio of me + words)
My love of words came early. Thanks in part to Great-Aunt Bessie, who was an avid reader and with whom I shared a room for several years, I read everything I could get my hands on—fairy tales and novels and poetry and National Geographic and Nancy Drew and seed catalogues and the backs of cereal boxes. Reading, of course, is a gateway drug to writing, and soon I was composing poems and songs while soaking in the bathtub, one of the few places where I could be alone. We were Marine brats, my five siblings and I, and by the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around, our family had already moved six times—from Indiana, where I was born, to Illinois, then North Carolina, Texas, California, Virginia, then back to California.
My first payment for writing came shortly after that thirteenth birthday, when I won $15 in an essay contest sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, in which I made an admirable case against alcohol, which I had not yet tasted. (Full disclosure: I no longer support the organization, for reasons too numerous to mention, though the term "single-malt scotch" comes to mind.)
As I soon discovered, writing would never pay my bills or college tuition, so as years went by, I took on whatever job I could find: soloist for weddings and funerals, proofreader, nanny, secretary, summer-stock actor, delivery person, Avon lady, and even one of those unfortunate souls condemned to stand behind the return counter at the Sears Catalog Store. After graduating from California State University, I began teaching in public schools and later earned graduates from the University of South Carolina. I recall the writing of my dissertation as the most painful encounter with words I have ever known or ever hope to know, an experience located somewhere between the seventh and eighth circles of Dante's Hell. Many times during those dissertation years I fantasized about returning myself to the return counter at Sears.
But thankfully, the years in South Carolina proved more than bearable, for there I met and married Donald Devet, later moving to Charlotte, North Carolina. While in Charlotte, Donald established and performed with Grey Seal Puppets and I taught high school, later serving as Writer-in-Residence for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. I estimate that I taught over 5000 students, grades K-12, over the course of my fifteen years in the program. In 1998, Donald and I moved to New York City and returned to Charlotte in 2009 to be closer to family and, later, to help care for my parents. In 2026, my twelfth book—about those years of caregiving—will be published.
When I'm not writing, teaching in one of several writing programs, or giving talks and readings, I'm putting in hours at another occupation: professional aunt. The current count is 37 nephews and nieces, including the greats-. Some days I fear I am channeling Great Aunt Bessie and that I will live out my twilight years sharing a room with one of the great-nieces, reading seed catalogues aloud until we both fall, exhausted, into dream. Other days, I think maybe that wouldn't be such a bad way to go.
