Maxine Scates

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone (forthcoming from New Issues in 2011), Black Loam (Cherry Grove Collections) which received the Lyre Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press) which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as Agni, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Hunger Mountain, Ironwood, Luna, Lyric, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Virginia Quarterly Review, Water~Stone Review, The Women’s Review of Books and ZYZZYVA. Her poems have been anthologized in For A Living (University of Illinois Press), Oregon Poetry: Oregon Literature Series (Oregon State University Press), The Pittsburgh Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press), A Gathering of Poets (Kent State University Press), Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (Oregon State University Press), Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses and is forthcoming in Poets of the American West.

Her poetry has also received a 2010 Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission.

Her essays and reviews have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, The American Voice, Calyx, Mississippi Review, Poetry East and Prairie Schooner and the anthologies: Liberating Memory: Our Work, Our Working Class Consciousness (Rutgers University Press), Stories That Shape Us: Women Write About The West (W.W. Norton) and Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis (Anchor/Doubleday).

She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford published by Copper Canyon Press.

She has  taught poetry and writing throughout the state of Oregon in the Artists-in-the-Schools Program, at Northwest Writing Institute, The Mountain Writers Center and at Lane Community College. She has also taught at Lewis and Clark College and, for many years, as Poet-in-Residence, Visiting Associate Professor, at Reed College. Currently, she teaches privately.  Originally from Los Angeles, she has lived in Eugene, Oregon since 1973.

Complete Reading from Mountain Writers Series 2009

Fan

Not There

The Giants

What I Wanted To Say