Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change and three award-winning books of poetry: Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison and Lamp of the Body. In 2016, Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally; A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents," citing that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, U.K., the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. PRI called it "the official poem of 2016".

In January 2022, when the board of trustees of McMinn County Schools in Tennessee, in a 10-0 decision, removed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus from its curriculum for 8th grade English classes, overriding a State curriculum decision, Smith was critical of the decision. She tweeted: "We’ve lost our damn minds if we think that to keep kids safe in school, we need to ban books, not assault weapons."

Animals

The president called undocumented immigrants

animals, and in the nature documentary

I watched this morning with my kids,

after our Saturday pancakes, the white

fairy tern doesn't build a nest but lays

her single speckled egg in the crook of a branch

or a tree knot. It looks precarious there

because it is. And while she's away,

because even mothers must eat, another bird

swoops in and pecks it, sips some of what now

won't become. The tern returns and knows

something isn't right -- the egg crumpled,

the red slick and saplike running down the tree --

but her instinct is so strong, she sits. Just sits

on the broken egg. I have been this bird.

We have been animals all our lives,

with our spines and warm blood, our milky tits

and fine layers of fur. Our live births, too,

if we're lucky. But what animal wrenches

a screaming baby from his mother?

Do we know anymore what it is to be human?

I've stopped knowing what it is to be human.

from Goldenrod (2021)

Poem Beginning with a Retweet

If you drive past horses and don't say horses

you're a psychopath. If you see an airplane

but don't point it out. A rainbow,

a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don't

whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer!

Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker

and don't shush everyone around you

into silence. If you find an unbroken

sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see

a dorsal fin breaking the water.

If you see the moon and don't say

oh my god look at the moon. If you smell

smoke and don't search for fire.

If you feel yourself receding, receding,

and don't tell anyone until you're gone.

from Goldenrod (2021)

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