Maura Stanton

Maura Stanton is a fiction writer and a poet who grew up in Chicago, Peoria, and Minneapolis before getting her MFA at the University of Iowa.  She taught creative writing at SUNY College at Cortland, the University of Richmond, Humboldt State University, the University of Arizona, and Mary Washington College before moving to Bloomington, Indiana, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for twenty-nine years. While at Indiana University, she served as director of the Creative Writing Program for three years and directed the IU Writers Conference for eight years.

Her first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and published in 1975. She has published five other books of poetry, Cries of Swimmers (Utah 1984); Tales of the Supernatural (Godine 1988); Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon 1998); Glacier Wine (Carnegie Mellon 2002); and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois 2008); as well as a chapbook of prose poems, Interiors, which won the Open Chapbook Contest from Finishing Line Press and was published in 2022.

She has also published a novel set in Paraguay, Molly Companion (Bobbs Merrill 1975 and Avon, 1979) which was translated into Spanish as Rio Abajo (Editorial Pomaire, Barcelona, 1978), and three books of short stories, including The Country I Come From (Milkweed Editions 1988) about growing up in a large family in the Midwest; Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, which won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction from the University of Notre Dame Press in 2002; and Cities in the Sea, selected by Charles Baxter and Nicholas Delbanco for the 2003 Michigan Literary Award for Short Story, which was a finalist for the 2004 Paterson Fiction Prize.

Her poems and stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Yale Review, New England Review, American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review and many other magazines and anthologies. She has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an O’Henry Award, two Supernatural Fiction Awards from The Ghost Story, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, Poem-A-Day, and the BBC radio program Words and Music.