Maggie Dietz

Poet and editor Maggie Dietz was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She earned a BA at Northwestern University and an MA in creative writing at Boston University. Dietz’s debut collection of poems, Perennial Fall (2006), won a Jane Kenyon Award and a Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award.
 
When reading Dietz’s poems, one can often sense an aperture widening or constricting as she deftly engages the movement of light and shadow across natural and human cycles. Describing Dietz’s best work as “intimate, idiomatic and thoroughly original,” David Kirby in a 2006 New York Times review of Perennial Fall observed, “Dietz’s lippy candor is invigorating in a wish-I’d-thought-of-that way, and it’s a pleasure to be led through her world as she looks at familiar subjects with fresh eyes.”
 
From 2004 to 2012, Dietz served as assistant poetry editor for Slate. She has also served as director of the Favorite Poem Project, founded by Robert Pinsky during his terms as US poet laureate. With Pinsky, she coedited the anthologies Americans’ Favorite Poems (1999), Poems to Read (2002), and An Invitation to Poetry (2004).
 
Dietz is the recipient of a Grolier Poetry Prize, a George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy, and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Dietz has taught at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Todd Hearon.