Biography

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 also on Kindle and NOOKbook, 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 in Topograph (2010) and a dark true love story in TriQuarterly vol. 137, reprinted in Utne Reader (Nov-Dec 2010). Her essay “What Really Happened” will appear in Best American Essays, 2011 (October 2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her review of a memoir by Kelle Groom was published in The New York Times Book Review in August 2011.

Madge lives in New York City and teaches nonfiction writing at the New School. In 2011-12, she is teaching in person at Tashkent International School, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and online at the New School.