Maggie Smith
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maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Maggie Smith
@maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
27K followers 1.1K following 660 posts
Poet & NYT bestselling author. New📚: DEAR WRITER, THE PEOPLE’S PROJECT (9.9.25), A SUIT OR A SUITCASE: POEMS (3.24.26). Host of @slowdownshow.org 🎧
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maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Celebrating the arrival of The People’s Project galleys 📘🥂

We are so incredibly proud of this anthology and can’t wait to share it with you this September.

Maggie & Saeed
@theferocity.bsky.social

www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pe...
June 28, 2025 at 11:19 AM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Then tonight, A&R Music Bar for…
May 3, 2025 at 12:24 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
It’s a rain & Radiohead kind of morning. I’ll be at the Ohioana Book Festival for a 10:45 am nonfiction panel & book signing if you’re heading there…
May 3, 2025 at 12:21 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Cincinnati, I’m coming your way tomorrow, Friday 4/18! Join me and the wonderful poet Felicia Zamora at Joseph-Beth Cincinnati at 7pm for a chat about Dear Writer, followed by a book signing.
April 17, 2025 at 7:21 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
⭐️ Grateful for this starred review of Dear Writer in @libraryjournal.bsky.social ⭐️

www.libraryjournal.com/review/dear-...
Like some seminal texts for writers by writers (Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Virginia Woolf’s A Letter to a Young Poet), this is at once pure craftsmanship and a glimpse of the gut-wrenching, visceral ways great writers feel the world around them. In 20 essays, poet Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful) shares how endlessly expandable the world is for—and to—the writer, and she encourages her readers to trust themselves as they explore this expansiveness with creativity and connection. Each section (attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity, and hope) begins with a letter or invocation to the reader-as-writer and unfolds with Smith’s signature honesty, showing her struggles and the moments of beauty she finds. She shares handwritten pages and the poems they become throughout, and despite her stature as a poet, it never feels patronizing or exclusionary.
April 2, 2025 at 3:25 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
✨Special guests revealed! I’m beyond excited that @birbigs.bsky.social & J. Hope Stein are joining Josh Radnor, @mobrowne.bsky.social, @ambertamblyn.bsky.social, @faithsalie.bsky.social & me to launch Dear Writer on Monday 3/31 at Symphony Space! 📗✍️
www.symphonyspace.org/events/maggi...
March 20, 2025 at 11:47 AM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Let’s go.💙 The People’s Project is coming 9.9.25 & is available for preorder now.
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pe...
March 4, 2025 at 2:58 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Top five lifetime shows for sure. Kim Deal in Dayton last night. ❤️🦩
February 21, 2025 at 3:09 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Last night’s medicine.✨
Destroyer & Father John Misty with two of my favorite humans.
February 18, 2025 at 1:20 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
This is 48.🖤

Here’s to another year of making art, taking beautiful risks, loving fiercely, and being open to whatever life floats into my hands.

How lucky we are, even on the hardest days, to all be here together, alive on this planet, at the same time.

Love,
Maggie
February 13, 2025 at 1:16 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
I guess this crystal in my jeans pocket will have to do the job.
January 30, 2025 at 2:20 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
New book of poems coming in spring 2026! 🧳
January 29, 2025 at 6:21 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
I’m on the road again this spring with Dear Writer.📗✈️

I’m heading to New York, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Columbus. Plus one virtual! I hope you’ll grab a few friends and come say hello.

This will be fun, and we have some surprises up our sleeves, too.

See you soon. x M
January 13, 2025 at 4:31 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
A poem from GOOD BONES offered without comment, for no reason whatsoever. 👀

Happy Sunday from here. x M
You Could Never Take A Car to Greenland, my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw could we use for that? What kind of oars could deliver one country to another? She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland? Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go promised nothing but ice? Who would cut her home to pieces and row away for that? Poem by Maggie Smith, from Good Bones (2017)
January 12, 2025 at 3:23 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
it is not unusual to sift through ashes and find an unburnt picture —Nikki Giovanni
January 8, 2025 at 8:46 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
It’s NYE & raining here. I wrote this poem in 2013, so the five-year-old is now sixteen.

Even when it’s hard to love the world unconditionally, and it’s never not hard, here’s to imagining what might be possible and what we can make so.

Love from here on a rainy Tuesday.
Rain, New Year's Eve By Maggie Smith The rain is a broken piano, playing the same note over and over. My five-year-old said that. Already she knows loving the world means loving the wobbles you can't shim, the creaks you can't oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts, MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum. Let me love the cold rain's plinking. Let me love the world the way I love my young son, not only when he cups my face in his sticky hands, but when, roughhousing, he accidentally splits my lip. Let me love the world like a mother. Let me be tender when it lets me down. Let me listen to the rain's one note and hear a beginner's song.
December 31, 2024 at 2:25 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Lucille Clifton, always.
“i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six even thirty-six but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me
December 30, 2024 at 12:00 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
December 25, 2024 at 11:50 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
For Christmas, my dad commissioned a painting of the Drexel Theatre marquee from my book launch last year. Thanks, Mom & Dad. Thanks to artist Gale Suver. It’s already on the wall.
December 25, 2024 at 1:27 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
My neighborhood goes (dies) hard this time of year.
December 24, 2024 at 3:39 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
21. Faded Polaroid. 🖤
December 18, 2024 at 3:58 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
A whole book of ‘em!
December 15, 2024 at 11:18 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
This endorsement for DEAR WRITER is…wow.

"Oh, how I wish I'd had access to this book 35 years ago, when I was just starting out as a writer! Maggie Smith has created an offering here of great substance and generosity….I admire this book, and its author, with all my heart." —Elizabeth Gilbert
November 29, 2024 at 4:56 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Hey hey! 🎉 My Thoughts Have Wings made NPR’s 2024 “Books We Love” list.

Working with illustrator Leanne Hatch & editor Donna Bray on this book was such a joy. Thanks, NPR. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...
It can be easy to forget that little kids have big thoughts, strong emotions and unbound imaginations swirling through their brains. And that constant activity doesn’t always stop when it’s time for bed. Poet Maggie Smith understands this and weaves a beautiful, comforting tale designed to ease and settle busy, anxious minds. She encourages children to build a “cozy nest” for their happy thoughts, while letting their worries fly away. A lovely conversation starter for kids and caregivers. (For ages 4 to 8) — Tayla Burney, director, Network Programming and Production
November 25, 2024 at 5:58 PM
maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
Because maybe you need this poem as much as I do.
The Thing Is BY ELLEN BASS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.
November 18, 2024 at 3:12 AM