Jeff McRae

Jeff McRae lives in Vermont where he works as a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. He earned a Masters in Writing from the University of New Hampshire and a Masters in Fine Arts in poetry from Washington University, St. Louis where he was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize.

Since returning to Vermont, he’s worked as a fly rod builder, a copywriter, in employment services for disabled youth, and for fifteen years as a creative writing and literature instructor. His poems have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Raleigh Review, Antioch Review, Rattle, Salamander, and many other publications. His was a Best New Poets nominee and has been a finalist for several first book awards including the New Issues Poetry Prize, the Gerald Cable Book Award, and the Cider Press Review Book Award. An active musician, he also performs in theaters, clubs, and concert halls throughout New England.

The Kingdom Where No One Dies

Jeff McRae’s debut collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, honors the ache and beauty of ordinary life. The poems inhabit transitional moments—leaving for college, moving houses, watching children grow, bearing witness to the slow dissolution of elders and traditions. While the collection evokes a strong sense of place—Vermont’s fields and back roads, barns and schoolrooms—it also conjures the psychic terrain of those navigating the passing of time and the breaking of long-held familial structures. Voices from past and present—sons, fathers, teachers, musicians, old lovers, and lost friends—interweave to form a choral meditation on intimacy, failure, and persistence.

The book was a Vermont Book Award finalist in 2026.