Maureen Seaton

Maureen Seaton was born in 1947 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and received an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College.

Seaton’s debut book of poetry, The Sea Among the Cupboards (New Rivers, 1992), was awarded the Capricorn Poetry Prize and the Society of Midland Authors Award. She is the author of five additional poetry collections, including Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009); Little Ice Age (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Furious Cooking (University of Iowa Press, 1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. Beautiful People (SMU Project Poëtica, 2024), her collaboration with both Denise Duhamel and Aaron Smith, was released posthumously.

On writing and teaching, Seaton says,

I love poems born of chaos and into hybridism. I love popular culture, subversive styles, feminizing and queering traditional form; but I’m equally at home in the middle of a lesson on the terza rima or ancient Japanese court poetry.

Seaton is also the author of Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. Among her numerous honors and awards are the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council.

Seaton taught at the University of Miami and lived in Florida until her death on August 26, 2023.