Margaret Britton Vaughn is Tennessee's poet laureate.
Personal life
Vaughn was born on July 16, 1938 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her father, Charles Britton Tomlinson, a fire fighter, died when Vaughn was 9 months old, and when Vaughn was four years old, her mother, brother, and her moved to Gulfport, Mississippi when her mother remarried. Vaughn was christened in the Methodist church and raised in the Church of Christ, but she most recently has expressed practicing with the Episcopal Church. Many of her feelings of hypocrisy and unnecessary rules in the church have inspired her writing such as her book You’re Laughing, Ain’t Ya, God? Vaughn currently lives in Bell Buckle, Tennessee where she receives many visitors and individuals seeking mentorship, advice, and someone to talk about poetry with. These visitors have included Bill Moyers and Maya Angelou. In recent years, Vaughn has overcome both kidney and breast cancer Vaughn is friends with country singerLoretta Lynn. They met through their mutual connection the Wilburn brothers in the 1960’s and bonded over similar writing styles. Vaughn and Lynn collaborated throughout their careers, and in 2004, the song Miss Being Mrs. Lynn and Vaughn helped write was nominated for a Grammy.
Career
Vaughn attended Perkinston Junior College and transferred to Mississippi Southern College, but she ultimately left this school without a degree in her senior year. Twenty-five years later, she completed her degree at Middle Tennessee State University with a degree in theater. Vaughn has expressed that the talents of poetry are inherited and their pursuit inevitable. She herself gave up her career of seventeen years in advertising to pursue writing full time, to her family and friends’ dismay. She began this transition by working in a newspaper to build her skills then fully committing to poetry. She is the only recipient of the Mark Twain fellowship from Elmira College. Her time in a place Mark Twain once lived in inspired her work, Foretasting Heaven: Conversations with Twain at Quarry Farm. Vaughn describes her writing as communicating the experience of living in small towns. From a young age, she was inspired by and heavily influenced by country music and wrote poems and songs. She has also written plays performed at the numerous Tennessee theaters; her most famous play, I Wonder if Eleanor Roosevelt Ever Made a Quilt, was performed at the National Quilter’s Convention. In 1995, the Tennessee state legislature selected Vaughn to be Tennessee’s poet laureate citing many of the plays, collections, and books Vaughn wrote throughout her career and her performances and outreach throughout the state of Tennessee. As poet laureate, Vaughn wrote Tennessee's bicentennial poem, inaugural poems for many Tennessee governors including current governor, Bill Lee, and a poem to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the US Air Force.
