Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks.

Smith’s poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, Image, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Guernica, Brevity, the Washington Post, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. In April 2017 the poem was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary.

A 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Maggie Smith works as freelance writer and editor. She is an Editor at Large at the Kenyon Review and is also on the faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program. 

Books in order of publication:

Full-length poetry collections

Goldenrod (One Signal Publishers, 2021)

Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017)

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015)—winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize

Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005)—winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award Poetry Award

Chapbooks

Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, 2016)—winner of the 2013 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize

The List of Dangers (Kent State University Press, 2010)—winner of the Wick Poetry Series Chapbook Competition

Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005)

Essay collections

Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change (One Signal Publishers, 2020)

Memoirs

You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Simon & Schuster, 2023)