Mary Austin Speaker is a poet and book designer. She is currently Creative Director of Milkweed Editions, where she also directs the Milkweed Fellowship program and leads diversity, equity, access and inclusion efforts.

Her first full-length collection, Ceremony, was selected by Matthea Harvey as winner of the 2012 Slope Editions book prize and was published in February 2013. Her second book, The Bridge, was published in January 2016 by Shearsman Books.

Preview and Order The Bridge from Small Press Distribution.

She is the author of the chapbooks In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys (Menagerie Editions 2009), Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions 2010), The Bridge (Push Press 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012). Her poetry can be found in the Boston Review, New Orleans Review, H_NGM_N, Big Bell, Mrs. Maybe, epiphany, Iowa Review, High Chair, Spork, and elsewhere. Mary has been poetry editor of the Indiana Review, taught creative writing and composition at Indiana University and Kirkwood Community College, lectured at Adelphi University, Coe College, Cornell College and the Putney School Summer program. She was a Bartos Fellow at the United World College and taught at the Jackson Hole Writers Workshop. She founded the Triptych Reading series in New York City and curated the Reading Between A and B series for several years. With Chris Martin and Sam Gould, she edited SOCIETY, a publication project about poetry and power, and curated a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi.

For over ten years she lived in New York City, working as an art director at HarperCollins, and as a senior designer for Simon & Schuster, and freelancing for clients like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, WW Norton and others. She lives with her husband, poet Chris Martin, and their two sons in Minneapolis.You can reach her at mary [dot] speaker [at] gmail [dot] com.

Check the events page for upcoming readings and the Reading Links to read some of her work.