Maggie Smith

@maggiesmithpoet

Poet & NYT bestselling author of A SUIT OR A SUITCASE, YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, DEAR WRITER, GOOD BONES +📚 Host of @slowdownshow.org

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Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 27

Book tour for A Suit or a Suitcase ☁️📖🧳 open.substack.com/pub/maggiesm...

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 7

I’ve been reading Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World aloud to Rhett—a book I loved as a kid—and this morning we agreed that this part is important: “I will not pretend I wasn’t petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t.”

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jun 28

Celebrating the arrival of The People’s Project galleys 📘🥂 We are so incredibly proud of this anthology and can’t wait to share it with you this September. Maggie & Saeed @theferocity.bsky.social www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pe...

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· May 3

Then tonight, A&R Music Bar for…

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· May 3

It’s a rain & Radiohead kind of morning. I’ll be at the Ohioana Book Festival for a 10:45 am nonfiction panel & book signing if you’re heading there…

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Apr 17

Cincinnati, I’m coming your way tomorrow, Friday 4/18! Join me and the wonderful poet Felicia Zamora at Joseph-Beth Cincinnati at 7pm for a chat about Dear Writer, followed by a book signing.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Apr 2

⭐️ Grateful for this starred review of Dear Writer in @libraryjournal.bsky.social ⭐️ www.libraryjournal.com/review/dear-...

Like some seminal texts for writers by writers (Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Virginia Woolf’s A Letter to a Young Poet), this is at once pure craftsmanship and a glimpse of the gut-wrenching, visceral ways great writers feel the world around them. In 20 essays, poet Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful) shares how endlessly expandable the world is for—and to—the writer, and she encourages her readers to trust themselves as they explore this expansiveness with creativity and connection. Each section (attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity, and hope) begins with a letter or invocation to the reader-as-writer and unfolds with Smith’s signature honesty, showing her struggles and the moments of beauty she finds. She shares handwritten pages and the poems they become throughout, and despite her stature as a poet, it never feels patronizing or exclusionary.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Mar 20

✨Special guests revealed! I’m beyond excited that @birbigs.bsky.social & J. Hope Stein are joining Josh Radnor, @mobrowne.bsky.social, @ambertamblyn.bsky.social, @faithsalie.bsky.social & me to launch Dear Writer on Monday 3/31 at Symphony Space! 📗✍️ www.symphonyspace.org/events/maggi...

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Mar 4

Let’s go.💙 The People’s Project is coming 9.9.25 & is available for preorder now. www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pe...

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Feb 21

Top five lifetime shows for sure. Kim Deal in Dayton last night. ❤️🦩

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Feb 18

Last night’s medicine.✨ Destroyer & Father John Misty with two of my favorite humans.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Feb 13

This is 48.🖤 Here’s to another year of making art, taking beautiful risks, loving fiercely, and being open to whatever life floats into my hands. How lucky we are, even on the hardest days, to all be here together, alive on this planet, at the same time. Love, Maggie

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 30

I guess this crystal in my jeans pocket will have to do the job.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 29

New book of poems coming in spring 2026! 🧳

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 13

I’m on the road again this spring with Dear Writer.📗✈️ I’m heading to New York, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Columbus. Plus one virtual! I hope you’ll grab a few friends and come say hello. This will be fun, and we have some surprises up our sleeves, too. See you soon. x M

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 12

A poem from GOOD BONES offered without comment, for no reason whatsoever. 👀 Happy Sunday from here. x M

You Could Never Take A Car to Greenland,

my daughter says. Unless the car could float.
Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean
turned to ice and promised not to crack.
Unless Greenland floated over here,
having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row
our country there. Our whole continent
would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless
we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw
could we use for that? What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland
if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called
Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland?
Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland
is an ad for Greenland. Who would go
promised nothing but ice? Who would cut
her home to pieces and row away for that?

Poem by Maggie Smith, from Good Bones (2017)

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Jan 8

it is not unusual to sift
through ashes
and find an unburnt picture

—Nikki Giovanni

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 31

It’s NYE & raining here. I wrote this poem in 2013, so the five-year-old is now sixteen. Even when it’s hard to love the world unconditionally, and it’s never not hard, here’s to imagining what might be possible and what we can make so. Love from here on a rainy Tuesday.

Rain, New Year's Eve
By Maggie Smith

The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles
you can't shim, the creaks you can't

oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain's plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain's one note
and hear a beginner's song.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 30

Lucille Clifton, always.

“i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 25

For Christmas, my dad commissioned a painting of the Drexel Theatre marquee from my book launch last year. Thanks, Mom & Dad. Thanks to artist Gale Suver. It’s already on the wall.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 24

My neighborhood goes (dies) hard this time of year.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 18

21. Faded Polaroid. 🖤

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Dec 15

A whole book of ‘em!

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Nov 29

This endorsement for DEAR WRITER is…wow. "Oh, how I wish I'd had access to this book 35 years ago, when I was just starting out as a writer! Maggie Smith has created an offering here of great substance and generosity….I admire this book, and its author, with all my heart." —Elizabeth Gilbert

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Nov 25

Hey hey! 🎉 My Thoughts Have Wings made NPR’s 2024 “Books We Love” list. Working with illustrator Leanne Hatch & editor Donna Bray on this book was such a joy. Thanks, NPR. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

It can be easy to forget that little kids have big thoughts, strong emotions and unbound imaginations swirling through their brains. And that constant activity doesn’t always stop when it’s time for bed. Poet Maggie Smith understands this and weaves a beautiful, comforting tale designed to ease and settle busy, anxious minds. She encourages children to build a “cozy nest” for their happy thoughts, while letting their worries fly away. A lovely conversation starter for kids and caregivers. (For ages 4 to 8)

— Tayla Burney, director, Network Programming and Production

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Nov 18

Because maybe you need this poem as much as I do.

The Thing Is
BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Nov 12

A little window into my texts with @theferocity.bsky.social today. I started a personal Project 2025 list. First item: no self-abandonment. What would be on yours? Also, friendship is damn essential right now.💗

Texts between friends. One reads: I started typing up my own Project 2025. First item: no self-abandonment.

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Apr 3

Never forget. 🫡🛼 Four years ago today, the Maya Angelou x Maggie Smith in rollerskates debacle. 😂 Happy Wednesday, all. x M

Maggie Smith@maggiesmithpoet· Nov 23