Virtual: Maggie Smith with Chely Wright, Goldenrod

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Chely Wright is an author, artist, advocate and relentless champion for equality. Wright rose to fame as a commercial country music singer in the ’90s–– enjoying years of critical acclaim, industry recognition, touring and chart-topping success. She made history in 2010 by becoming the first artist in the genre to publicly come out as gay, which she wrote about in her memoir entitled Like Me. In 2011, the Emmy-nominated and multiple award-wining documentary, Wish Me Away, chronicled Chely’s coming out journey, cementing the film as essential-viewing among LGBTQ audiences, faith communities, learning institutions and beyond. In addition to her long-standing relationships with key advocacy organizations, Wright has served on multiple boards including GLSEN, T.J. Martell and Faith in America.  She is also the founder of two non-profits; Reading, Writing & Rhythm which raised $1M+ to support music and arts in public schools and The LikeMe Organization, established to provide resources for the LGBTQ community and their families. Chely is the Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer for Unispace.