About

I was born in Alabama, grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and spent many childhood summers on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod.

I graduated from Carleton College, and after a brief turn as a performance poet, worked in theater as a playwright, actor and monologuist. My work for the stage has been praised by critics as philosophical, funny, sophisticated, vividly imagined and emotionally deep. In 2010, I wrote an essay that was selected the winner of Glamour magazine’s “My Real-Life Story Essay Contest” by judges Mary Karr, Jane Smiley, Julia Alvarez and Jennifer 8 Lee. It would become the catalyst for my memoir, The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures.

Other excerpts from The Saltwater Twin have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Creative Nonfiction, The Chattahoochee Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and on themanifeststation.net. I was a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Steinberg Essay Prize and first runner up for New Letters Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for the Essay. I have been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Ragdale. I’m represented by Ellen Geiger at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

I teach writing and theater in schools, health care facilities and jails in Chicago. I’ve designed and taught workshops for students, teachers and teaching artists for Chicago Public Schools, Urban Gateways, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Lookingglass Theatre, Columbia College Chicago and Lyric Opera Chicago, among others.You can read a bit about some of my teaching projects in Missed Connections: Meet me in a field of snow and On Writers, Egos and Truth and at maiamorgan.com.

Here at the saltwater twin, I’ve been documenting the process of working on The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures. I plan to keep blogging through its publication and from there into whatever adventure happens next.