Richard McCann

• + Bio

  Prize-winning poet Richard McCann, author of Ghost Letters (1994), saw his first prose book, Mother of Sorrows (2005), cited by the New York Times for its “rare thematic richness.” Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours) hailed the work as “almost unbearably beautiful” and “intricately felt.” Based in Washington, D.C., McCann teaches in the MFA department of American University.

• + Back Story

  “Each August, when my brother and I were little, our father took us in our Country Squire on what proved to be our first real road trips, our annual eight-hour drives from Washington, D.C., to Cammal, Penn., a former logging town, pop. 61, so we could fish for trout.

  “In the evenings, after we'd cleaned and cooked whatever we'd caught that day, our father often walked us down to the railroad tracks, telling us stories of his father, a brakeman on the Pennsylvania RR, who'd died before we were born. Sometimes, our father gave us pennies to place on the tracks. In the morning, my brother and I would return to find them flattened and flung into the high weeds by the freight trains that had passed through while we slept. These are the pennies I had in mind, I suspect, when I wrote of the Press-a-Penny machines along the New Jersey Turnpike.

  “Today, whenever I travel the turnpike, as I often do, I stop at one of these machines to press a penny. I do this in honor of my brother, with whom I spent every waking day of my childhood; my brother, who has been dead now for more than 20 years.”