MCC to Host Award-Winning Poet Maggie Dietz

As part of its Visiting Writers Series, Middlesex Community College will host poetry writer Maggie Dietz at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 7, in the Lowell Campus Federal Building, Assembly Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Described by The New York Times Book Review as “intimate, idiomatic and thoroughly original,” and Publisher’s Weekly as, “the quiet humility, even resignation” of poems born out of “the elegiac tradition in which Dietz works, one designed to answer the largest questions of all,” Dietz’s poetry is widely acclaimed.

“Poetry fills a particular human hunger for compactness and intensity – and there’s deep pleasure in saying a good poem aloud,” Dietz said. “Poetry is intimate and requires a kind of attention, a level of listening – actual or imagined listening – that can make life feel more urgent or immediate, even more real, in days increasingly dominated by digital interactions. The best poems remind us what it means to be human.”

Dietz is an Assistant Professor of English at UMass Lowell where she teaches creative writing. Teaching, and workshopping students’ work in particular, are important to her. She views writing workshops to be a kind of mentorship that helps students examine their work from a critical lens.

She said, “I believe the artist bears responsibility to extend knowledge to succeeding generations through hands-on mentorship and instruction. My goals as a teacher are simple: to engage and inspire students in the classroom, and to give them the foundation for a lifelong love of poetry.”

Working with students has also influenced her own creative process. Dietz understands the difficulty of finding time to write while managing a hectic schedule, and teaching has provided a good reminder to keep at it.

“My students inspire me,” she said. “Especially when I see their imaginations suddenly open as they begin to access and inhabit their own original voices.”

Dietz published two books of poetry, “That Kind of Happy” (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and “Perennial Fall” (University of Chicago, 2006), which won New Hampshire’s 2007 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry and a Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Agni, Harvard Review and Salmagundi.

She served for several years as director of the Favorite Poem Project, a national undertaking founded by Robert Pinsky during his time as United States Poet Laureate, dedicated to celebrating, documenting and enhancing poetry’s role in American lives. With Pinsky, she co-edited three anthologies related to the project – “Americans’ Favorite Poems” (W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), “Poems to Read” (Norton, 2002), and “An Invitation to Poetry” (Norton, 2004).

Dietz has been awarded a number of prizes and fellowships, including the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

Before coming to UMass Lowell, Dietz taught in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. From 2004-2012, she was assistant poetry editor for the online magazine, Slate.

MCC’s Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement. For more information, call 978-656-3363 or email StudentEngagement@middlesex.mass.edu.

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