Poet Mary Ann McFadden has been writing and publishing for almost fifty years. Her poems have appeared in The American Voice, Southern Poetry Review, Green Mountain Review, Bloom, Psychology Tomorrow, Kayak, Askew, Spillway, and Solo Voyage, among others. Eye of the Blackbird, her first book, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry in 1997. Her second book, Devil Dear, was published by Alice James Books in 2014. The American Voice nominated the six-poem sequence, “Marriage,” for a Pushcart Prize. McFadden’s poems have been anthologized in The Arc of Love, an anthology of lesbian love poems published by Scribner, and in Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems by Ballantine Books. Recently, two of McFadden’s poems were selected by poet and editor, Joan Larkin, for a special section in Hanging Loose magazine.

McFadden has taught for the Poetry in the Schools Program and taught workshops for the New York Public Library. In 1995, McFadden founded the Chelsea Poetry Workshop. She taught ESL and Poetry at Brooklyn College, CUNY, for ten years. In 2005, several of McFadden’s shorter poems were set to music by the composer, Gerald Busby, and performed at Carnegie Hall. In 2010, McFadden was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship.

McFadden was educated in the Fillmore school system, K through 12, and graduated from Occidental College. She studied with the poet, Carolyn Kizer, in the University of Maryland, and later received her MFA in English/Creative Writing from New York University. At NYU, she was fortunate to work with Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnel, and the Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai. In 1998, McFadden moved to Mazatlan and later to San Miguel Allende, Mexico, where she lived for fourteen years.

Currently, McFadden lives and writes in the Santa Clara River Valley near Fillmore. Her third book, Rosa Mundi, is awaiting publication. Since returning to Ventura County, Mary Ann has enjoyed reading and attending poetry events at the E.P. Foster Library in Ventura, as well as online, and at the Ojai Poetry Series.