Louis McKee was born in Philadelphia, PA, July 31, 1951. He is the author of Schuylkill County (Wampeter, 1982), The True Speed of Things (Slash & Burn, 1984) and eleven other collections of poetry. There is published a selected poems, River Architecture: Poems from Here & There 1973-1993 (Cynic, 1999), as well as a volume in the Pudding House Greatest Hits series. Gerald Stern has called his work "heart-breaking" and "necessary," while William Stafford has written, "Louis McKee makes me think of how much fun it was to put your hand out a car window and make the air carry you into quick adventures and curlicues. He is so adept at turning all kinds of sudden glimpses into good patterns."
Near Occasions of Sin, a collection issued in 2006 by Cynic Press, reflects his strong Irish-Catholic, working class upbringing, as well as his inclination to stray, or at least investigate the numerous temptations in the shadows just beyond the primrose path. The volume has been praised by Brendan Kennelly: "I really admire, and like, deeply, Louis McKee's poems. They have two qualities I love - clarity and candour. And they often tell stories even as they evoke mysteries of being. And they engage a great deal with people…. Then, he is a moving, complex love-poet, at once passionate and reserved. McKee's poems are like flashes of spirit rooted in the body. He never hides behind, or in, obscurity. Near Occasions of Sin is utterly unpretentious because his genius (I think he has that) is so real; "I am content with this," he says at the end of "Failed Haiku," and this readiness to be himself, in all his complexity and simplicity, is, I think, the basis of the appeal of this most unusual and attractive book. Sometimes, McKee talks to his reader and it is like talking to a next-door neighbor (that's what I mean by candour in these poems). Also, they sound like songs at times - winged, humane, vulnerable."
McKee was a longtime editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly. During his tenure he put together three special issues, celebrating the work of Etheridge Knight and John Logan, as well as a retrospective 20th-anniversary volume of the PBQ. He currently operates Banshee Press and edited the magazine One Trick Pony until its demise in 2007.
An interview: http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/mckeeinterview.htm