Glimpses from readings: Young Maggie watches a stool, pretending it's a TV -- a farm wife cooks and cleans endlessly without a thank you from anyone -- radishes with insomnia ... a young girl living in both New York City and Rowlesburg, WV ... 

Personal: Father's family roots in Preston County, born in 1948 in New York City, where her mother and father were teaching, moved to Buckhannon, then Keyser as a young girl. Now lives in Kent, Ohio, where she directs the creative writing program at Kent State University.

Publications: The Great Horned Owl, Icarus Press 1979; Years That Answer, Harper and Row 1980; Cold Comfort, Pittsburgh 1986; A Space Filled with Moving, University of Pittsburgh Press 1992; Windfall, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

Anthology editor: Learning by Heart, A Gathering of Poets. Editor, Hill Daughter.

Education and Career: BA West Virginia University 1970, MA 1973, MSW 1977. Teacher WV Rehabilitation Center, counselor for blind, research writer, Poet-in-the-Schools West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, poet-in-residence Marshall County, etc., professor and director of Wick Creative Writing Program, Kent State University. Co-editor with Irene McKinney of poetry journal Trellis. Translator of German-language poetry.

Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Best Small Press Books of 1979 by the American Library Association for The Great Horned Owl. Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention 1993 and 1994, Pushcart Prize nominations 1980, 1983, 1991, 1993, 1994. West Virginia Arts and Humanities Commission Fellowship 1980. Ohio Arts Council Fellowship, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Fellowship.

Reviewers' Comments: 
-"With an understated irony, as well as broad compassion sometimes moved to anger, Anderson�s poems reflect an intimate and loving knowledge of the world they evoke, and earn their frustrations honestly." (Publishers Weekly) 
-"Windfall possesses a huge, spellbinding, honed acuity and aesthetic certainty. Always cutting to the quick of modern flux, her poems elevate the natural brilliance of small things in our lives, urban and pastoral, or at the heart of a shifting emotional landscape." (Yosef Kamunyakaa) 
-"Maggie Anderson writes a serious, surmising poetry, a poetry knowledgeable of image and music, pieces of energy of taut string, and shining sanity." (Gwendolyn Brooks) 
-"Caught between the oppositions of decorum and lawlessness, indolence and rigor, spiced by secrecy and appetite, Anderson is a poet who confronts loss and dread and, like the black dog, despite the grey fog, stands up." (Alicia Ostriker)

Excerpts from In Their Own Country:

Kate: If you thought nobody was going to read or hear the poems that you write, would you write them?

Maggie: Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

Kate: Why?

Maggie: ...For me, there's some satisfaction in being able to articulate something that I don't seem to know how to articulate in any other way. Writing is kind of a double life. I live life, and then I write life. And they're both equally important. And if I stopped breathing in either one, it would be some kind of ending.

Maggie: ... I had an aunt in Rowlesburg whom I especially loved, my Aunt Nida.

Kate: And she asked about your poetry. Did she ask to read it?

Maggie: Yes. And she asked to read the books I read in college. And I remember one summer, in particular, I was in summer school in Morgantown, taking a class in southern writers, and I was reading Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.  And I'd read the books I was supposed to read, then I'd leave them there. And during the week, she would read them. Then I'd come back the next weekend, and we would talk about them. It was really, really a wonderful thing.. Two educations for the price of one.

She was a wonderful critic. She would read those books and get so excited about them. We'd talk about Faulkner, we talked about about technique, we talked about those strange voices. We talked about Eudora Welty...

Maggie: I'm a big believer in keeping diaries, journals, notes. And when you say that, people think, uh-oh, I can't do that. They think it's some kind of dutiful exercise, that they'd have to write down what they did every day.  You don't have to do that. You can write a sentence ever day. You can write a word. You can write a color you noticed today.

Sometimes when I go for a walk, I notice doors. I do that when I travel a lot. Everywhere I go, I take pictures of doors. The pictures weren't the point. I'm not a great photographer. The point was, to focus myself on a small thing in a lot of different places. And then just have a picture of it and write a little bit about it.

Kate: To focus myself on a small thing. Now you do that habitually. You focus on cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, moths...

Maggie: I think it's just those very small things that sometimes get squashed out in the daily run of our busy lives. That are often the most important things. I mean, it's a cliche, about stopping to smell the roses. But there's truth in it. If you stop every day and just notice some little thing, your imagination - which I believe is like a muscle - will get stronger. And it'll help you notice things more often. With more regularity and with more care.

See also:  Maggie Anderson, Contemporary Authors Online, International Authors and Writers Who's Who, Directory of Poets & Writers, Who's Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, and Poets, Mountainlit.com

Program Music performed by: Tim Courts, Robin Kessinger, Bob Webb