Dietz, Maggie

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Dietz, Maggie

PERSONAL:

Born in Green Bay, WI; married. Education: Northwestern University, B.A., Boston University, M.A.

CAREER:

Writer. Boston University, Boston, MA, lecturer in creative writing. Formerly director of national Favorite Poem Project.

AWARDS, HONORS:

George Bennett Fellowship, Phillips Exeter Academy, 2002-2003; Grolier Poetry Prize; Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Provincetown, MA.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

(Editor, with Robert Pinsky) Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, Norton (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor, with Robert Pinsky) Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with Robert Pinsky) An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Perennial Fall, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Poetry, Slate, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Agni. Assistant poetry editor, Slate.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet Maggie Dietz, the former director of the Favorite Poem Project, has coedited numerous anthologies drawn from that project, and has also published a volume of her own work, titled Perennial Fall. Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology showcases the work done in the unique Favorite Poem Project, which was conceived by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky's idea, which was carried out by Dietz, was to invite Americans from the general population to share a poem they particularly loved. Selected respondents were then recorded in audio and video, reading their chosen poem and telling a little about themselves. The result was an archive that showed Americans to be more connected with poetry than one might think. In this book, selected poems from the project were brought together in a "resounding collection," according to Donna Seaman in Booklist. More poems from the project were published in later anthologies, including Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology and An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology.

Dietz published a collection of her own work in 2006, titled Perennial Fall. Formal in style and elegiac in tone, the verse in Perennial Fall covers somber subjects "with clarity and resolve," stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Dietz's work is, at its best, "intimate, idiomatic and thoroughly original," stated David Kirby in the New York Times Book Review. Her work frequently dwells on everyday objects, and yet, in Kirby's opinion, "it's a pleasure to be led through her world as she looks at familiar subjects with fresh eyes."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 1, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, p. 504; June 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poems Project Anthology, p. 1670.

Kliatt, July, 2003, review of Poems to Read, p. 4.

Library Journal, July 1, 2002, Daniel L. Guillory, review of Poems to Read, p. 85; August 1, 2004, Joel Whitney, review of Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology, p. 86.

New York Times Book Review, August 20, 2006, David Kirby, review of Perennial Fall, p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, April 3, 2006, review of Perennial Fall, p. 42.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 23, 2002, review of Poems to Read.