Maryfrances Wagner

Maryfrances Wagner teaches creative and academic writing, as well as workshops, at all levels and served as Missouri’s sixth poet laureate from 2021-2023. She co-edits I-70 Review and is on The Writers Place board of directors. Her latest books are The Immigrants’ New Camera, Solving for X, and Backstories. Her 1999 poetry collection, Red Silk, won the Thorpe Menn Book Award and in 2024, after its re-release, was a grand prize award finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), and more. She is the granddaughter of four Italian immigrants.