West Virginia University alumna and WVU Press author Irene McKinney will be among the guests on the popular National Public Radio showWhadYa Know?with Michael Feldman Saturday (June 28). The program will be broadcast from the Charleston Municipal Auditorium at 11 a.m.

McKinney is West Virginias poet laureate. The Barbour County native is the author ofVivid Companion,published by the WVU Press in 2004. She has penned five books of poetry and was editor ofBackcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia,also published by the WVU Press in 2002.

McKinney received her doctorate from the University of Utah in 1980, her masters degree in English from WVU in 1970 and a bachelors degree in English from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1968.

Besides being the states poet laureate since 1993, she has held the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. In addition, she received the Utah Arts Council Prize Award in Fiction and the Cincinnati Review Annual Poetry Prize, and she was awarded the Appalachian Mellon Fellowship from the University of Virginia, as well as the MacDowell and Breadloaf fellowships.

McKinney has held teaching positions throughout the nationmost recently as a professor at West Virginia Wesleyan. She is the co-founder and editor with Maggie Anderson of the poetry journal Trellis.

For more information on the WVU Press, go tohttp://www.wvupress.com/.