Maggie Graber (she/her/hers) is a queer poet born and raised in the Chicago area. She grew up fifteen minutes south of Lake Michigan in Valparaiso, Indiana, where she loved playing basketball, customizing her LiveJournal, and star-gazing at the Indiana Dunes. She is the author of the poetry collection, Swan Hammer: an Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors (Michigan State University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and a 2023 nominee for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award. She holds a BA in English and Religious Studies from Indiana University and an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and residencies from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Union League Club of Chicago Library, Monson Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Denali National Park. Maggie’s been a wilderness therapy field guide, an English teacher, an outdoor educator, a farmhand, a radio DJ, and a certified Wilderness First Responder (WFR, pr. “woofer”). She currently lives and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she also earned her Ph.D. in English - Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi.
[photo credits L-R: selfie/ Graber family archive / New Vision Wilderness Archive / Kristin Shelly]