Madge McKeithen lived the first seventeen years of her life in North Carolina before going to the College of William and Mary and then to graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. Thirty years later she returned to North Carolina four times in two years to study and write in the Queens low-residency MFA program. Her first book, Blue Peninsula (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), now on Kindle, tells in fragments of her turn to poetry in the wake of her older son’s undiagnosed degenerative neurological disorder. Her work can also be read at these links — “Paul Newman On Sixth Avenue.” Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Books, 2009), an essay about her father in her hometown paper, an essay about “going public” (library) with her love for poetry, forthcoming in Topograph and the first chapter of a dark true love story in TriQuarterly. Madge lives in New York City and teaches nonfiction writing at the New School.