Ray McManus

Ray McManus didn’t grow up with poetry in his house. He had to steal it. He insists that act alone is one of the five most important things he has done in his life. Growing up in rural South Carolina in a working class, Irish-American family taught him, “the value of keeping things real by looking at them slant.” McManus’s poems can be quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes quite dark, often both 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 (published by Stepping Stones Press in 2008), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize and was published by Marick Press in 2011), and Punch. (published by Hub City Press in 2014). McManus has recently co-edited an anthology of South Carolina writers responding to photographs housed at the Caroliniana Library at USC. The anthology is called Found Anew, and will be out this fall with USC Press. McManus’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.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 -- or more precisely, that unreal Ireland of the imagination that exists in family story and immigrant memory. McManus’s work explores themes that wrestle with loss, faith, denial, and rebellion, the narrative of hope and the heroics of failure. 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 America, 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 has won many awards for teaching and scholarship on southern and Irish culture. He 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. He lives in Lexington, South Carolina, with his wife Lindsay and their three children.