IPP - biography assignment - revised

Maura Stanton

Maura Stanton was born on the 9^th of September, 1949, to Joseph and Wanda Stanton in Evanston, Illinois. She has a BA from the University of Minnesota (1969) and a MFA from the University of Iowa (1971). Her first book of poetry, Snow on Snow (Yale, 1975), won Stanton the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a very prestigious award for a new poet. This book began a career of creative writing that stretched from novels to short stories to poetry and that was acknowledged by many universities and other poets as being the start of something excellent (“Maura Stanton” 1).

Molly Companion (1977) was Stanton’s next book, a novel. Molly Companion was followed by Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah, 1984), a poetry book, Tales of the Supernatural: Poems (1988), a collection of poems, Life among the Trolls (1994), poetry, Glacier Wine (Carnegie Mellon University, 2001), poetry, and finally Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois, 2008), her latest book of poetry. Since her first book, Stanton has also won many more prizes and awards for her poetry, including the Frances Steloff Fiction Prize (1975), the Lawrence Foundation Prize in Fiction (1982), and others (Maura Stanton Biography 1).

In 1972, before her first book of poetry was published, Maura Stanton married Richard Cecil. After her marriage and as her writing career began to unfold, she has also taught at many universities. From 1972 to 1973 she taught at the State University of New York at Cortland, followed by teaching at the University of Richmond from 1973 to 1977. She then went to Humbolt State University from 1977 to 1978, and the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1982. In 1982 she moved to teach at the University of Indiana, where she continues to teach creative writing (Maura Stanton Biography 2).

Maura Stanton’s work has mainly looked at the way human imagination works in the everyday. At the start of her career, she was compared to Sylvia Plath for her use of strange metaphors and themes, as well as her ability to take something from within herself and lay it out in a way that makes it seem real and stark. Her early work was full of “bitter irony” and cast a critical eye toward the way human beings act and think. With her second book, her poetry shifted to tell more stories, to become more “narrative,” perhaps a reflection of her work in prose, Molly Companion, between the two poetry books. As Stanton aged, her work matured, and in her poems she faced her “middle age” and the idea of death and mortality, especially in her book Glacier Wine. Her poems, while still holding a surreal air to them, became less magical and more rooted in the everyday magic all around. Living among the Trolls was even more focused on Stanton’s real life, as a way for her to vent her frustrations about certain people she knew and worked with at the time at the University of Indiana (“Maura Stanton” 2).

Immortal Sofa, the most recent of her works, is a continuation of her previous messages. She tells the story of everyday life, moments of her imagination that she captured on paper. Her poems are very narrative, a process she started with her second book, and fanciful without being explicitly supernatural, as was starting to show in the middle of her career. Immortal Sofa, like her book Glacier Wine, also deals with aging and how her views of the world have changed, as she has gotten older. It still contains a surreal air while looking at life as it happens every day, telling the tale of the world with strange metaphors and fanciful images while still being rooted in reality.

Stanton’s Bibliography

• Snow on Snow (poetry), foreword by Stanley Kunitz, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1975.
• Molly Companion (novel), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1977.
• Cries of Swimmers (poetry), University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1984.
• The Country I Come From (stories), Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 1988.
• Tales of the Supernatural: Poems, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1988.
• Life among the Trolls (poetry), David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1994.
• Glacier Wine (poetry), Carnegie Mellon University Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2001.
• Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling (stories), University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN), 2002.
• Cities in the Sea (stories), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2003.
• Immortal Sofa (poetry), University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 2008.
  Works Cited

"Maura Stanton." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 6 Feb. 2011.

Maura Stanton Biography. Book Rags. Web. 6 Feb. 2011.