TURNER – Wesley McNair, who has served three times on the nominating jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, will give a poetry reading and book signing Thursday, April 23, at the Turner Public Library.

McNair is the author of nine collections of poetry, including seven full-length volumes and two limited editions, and a volume of essays about poetry. His poems deal often comically but always affectionately with hardscrabble Mainers and offer thoughtful glimpses of his own life. He examines the ways in which we negotiate between the lives we lead and the more distant things of which we dream.

McNair has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in literature and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for creative writers. In 2006, he was granted a $50,000 United States Artists fellowship, one of 50 awarded across the arts to a selection of “America’s finest living artists.”

A recent series on Robert Frost, for which McNair wrote the scripts, was aired over affiliates of PBS and received an Emmy.

McNair’s recent collections of verse are “Talking in the Dark,” “Fire” and “The Ghosts of You and Me.” A volume of new and selected poems, “Lovers of the Lost,” will be forthcoming this year.

McNair is currently Professor Emeritus and writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.

The reading will begin at 7 p.m, with a question-and-answer session to follow.