Marjorie Maddox

Assistant Editor

A 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize, Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA), and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Common Wealth University, Marjorie Maddox has seventeen collections of poetry. These include Begin with a Question (International Book Award Winner, Illumination Book Award Winner, and Catholic Media Award, Third Place); the ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with artist daughter Anna Lee Hafer www.hafer.work and others), a 2023 Dragonfly Book Award in photography/fine arts and American Fiction Winner Award in poetry; How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks; True, False, None of the Above (Poeima Poetry Series and Illumination Book Award Medalist); Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech); and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize). Small Earthly Space (Shanti Arts 2024), Seeing Things (Wildhouse 2025), and Hover Here (Broadstone 2025) are forthcoming. The host of the WPSU-FM radio program Poetry Moment, she has 700 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies.

Maddox’s story collection, What She Was Saying, a national finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter and Eludia book awards, was published by Fomite Press in 2017. In addition, she is co-editor, with Jerry Wemple, of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Press 2005 and 2025) and has four children’s/YA books: A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems, Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises, and I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book).

Other honors include Cornell University’s Chasen Award; the Paumanok Poetry Award; an Academy of American Poets Prize; the Seattle Review’s Bentley Prize for Poetry; a Bread Loaf Scholarship; Pushcart Prize nominations in both poetry and fiction; and Lock Haven University's Honors Professor of the Year. Maddox gives readings, workshops, radio interviews, and lectures around the country. She is the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.

Poetry leads to discovery, prompting us to face ourselves, others, and the world. Certainly the poet has the potential to become that voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” And yet—similar to a powerful painting or piece of music—poetry can’t be paraphrased or condensed; it must be experienced. The words need to become, as Marianne Moore argued, “imaginary gardens with real toads”—be it the gardens of Versailles, Eden, Gethsemane, or Babylon. May the poems of Presence be such a garden, thick with your words, lush with the everyday and the eternal. We invite you to enter.

https://www.marjoriemaddox.com/