R. Rennie McQuilkin ’58

Rennie died July 3, 2024, in Hartford, Conn. He was 88.

He came to Princeton from Allendale School in Rochester, N.Y. After matriculation at Princeton, he later attended Harvard Law School, before thinking better of it, and Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in English literature.

Rennie taught at several private secondary schools until 1992, when he became the founding artistic director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. A few years later, he started the independent poetry press Antrim House. During his own career as a poet, Rennie was a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, and The American Scholar, and was the author of some 20 collections. He won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Barack Obama’s second inaugural poet wrote of some of Rennie’s most recent work, that it “brilliantly and powerfully juxtaposes the intimacy of family life with the enmity of our troubled times.”

He married Sarah Couch in 1961, and they had three children, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Sarah died in 2023. The class extends its deepest sympathy to them all.