Published in 2020
224 pages
Maggie Smith is the author of Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (2020); Good Bones (2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015), winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn; and Lamp of the Body (2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks.
Smith’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, Image, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Guernica, Brevity, the Washington Post, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. In April 2017 the poem was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary.
A 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Maggie Smith works as freelance writer and editor. She is also on the faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program
What is this book about?
“Keep Moving speaks to you like an encouraging friend reminding you that you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and Untamed
For fans of Anne Lamott and Cleo Wade, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life’s challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience.
When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?
