Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University. She is the author of Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock, 2013); Perpendicular As I (1994 Sandstone Book Award); Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (2001 Redgreene Press Chapbook Winner); Body Parts (1999); Ecclesia (1997); How to Fit God into a Poem (1993 Painted Bride Chapbook Winner); Nightrider to Edinburgh (1986 Amelia Chapbook Winner); and the forthcoming short story collection What She Was Saying, as well as over 450 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies.
She is the co-editor, with Jerry Wemple, of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and two children's books--A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry (2008) and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009)--and two forthcoming--A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball's Great Experimentand Inside Out: Poems on Writing Poems. Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises. Her memoir essay, "Going Exactly Where We Want to Go," is included in Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, edited by Todd Davis.
Marjorie studied with A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Phyllis Janowitz, and Ken McClane at Cornell, where she received her MFA in poetry in 1989. Maddox received an MA in English at the University of Louisville and a BA in Literature at Wheaton College. She lives with her husband and two children in Williamsport, PA, birthplace of Little League and home of the Little League World Series. She is the great grandniece of baseball legend Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.
"Marjorie Maddox's newest book offers visions of disaster, tempered by a mother's hope. In taut language, these poems move into the center of familiar tragedies, often lifted from the news--9/11, school shootings, kidnappings, floods, and hurricanes--rendering each one personal. Local News from Someplace Else is a reminder that what separates us from destruction are sheer luck (or grace) and the insistence of life itself."
--Shara McCallum, author of This Strange Land and The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems
"Marjorie Maddox brings us Local News from Someplace Else, a 'brief alphabet of grief,' 'where loss . . . flies fastest / in the smallest of words': hurricanes, fires, school shootings, mine cave-ins. But she is also a reporter of joy: births, barbecues, retirement parties, hotel rooms with 'the hundred-plus / channels of cable / deliciously at our command.' 'We are in love / with room service at midnight,' Maddox writes, and you will be too."
--Barbara Crooker, author of Gold
"Marjorie Maddox's poems move with faith and grace through the violent landscapes of contemporary America, through the humdrum chores of parenting and work, through the thin spaces that divide the living from the dead. Hers is a poetry haunted by the presence of survivors, and, as she confesses, 'What we hold / is ourselves holding on.' In the gift of her deeply reflective poems, we glimpse 'the sad joy that lets her see / all that the world is.'"
--Todd Davis, author of In the Kingdom of the Ditch and The Least of These