Maura Stanton


Maura Stanton, is an American poet, and writer.

Biography

Maura Stanton was born to Joseph Stanton, a salesman, and Wanda Haggard Stanton, a nurse, in Evanston, Illinois. She received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1969, and her M.F.A. in 1971 from the University of Iowa.
She married Richard Cecil in 1972. She has taught at the State University of New York at Cortland, the University of Richmond, Humboldt State University, the University of Arizona, and Indiana University, since 1982. She was also named as the distinguished author in residence at Mary Washington College for the 1981–1982 academic year.
Her first book of poetry, SNOW ON SNOW, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975, and was reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1993 as part of its contemporary classics series. Her second book, CRIES OF SWIMMERS, was published by the University of Utah Press in 1984 and was reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1991. Her work appeared in Ploughshares.

Awards

The poet and novelist Maura Stanton's interwoven short stories about growing up in the Midwest trace the awakening of adult consciousness in its unnamed narrator, a strongly moral, sensible girl, resentful of the world's ability to impinge on even the most serene domestic scenes and the complicity of memory in the process: Inside everyone's head, just below their pretty or bored wandering eyes, the strangest and most frightening pictures must be permanently etched.