Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith

About Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is an American poet and writer. Smith's poem Good Bones, originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents, citing that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, U.K., the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. From this success the book Good Bones (2017), was named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry.
She is the author of Keep Moving (2020), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015), winner of the 2012 Dorset prize and a 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award; and Lamp of the Body (2005), winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. Smith is also the author of three chapbooks: Disasterology (2016), The List of Dangers (2010), and Nesting Dolls (2005). Her poems have also appeared in many magazines including The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, iamb and other journals.

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Maggie Smith Poems




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