Megan Grumbling writes poetry, criticism and essays, and dramatic works, and serves as an editor, teacher, and writing mentor. Her second poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, launched in fall of 2020 from Acre Books. Her first collection, Booker's Point (UNT 2016), was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Book Award for Poetry.
Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has been included in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, the New York Times Poetry Pairing Series, and Verse Daily.
As a filmmaker, she is co-director/producer with David Camlin of We Are the Warriors (2023), which follows members of a Maine high school community as they grapple with ingrained settler narratives about their Native American mascot and the difficult conversation of whether to retire the image. We Are The Warriors was awarded the Tourmaline Prize for best feature at the 2023 Maine International Film Festival. Megan also wrote and co-directed the short film and cultural allegory Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production.
Megan is also the librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a co-creation with the late composer Denis Nye, and of which her newest collection is an expansion. This experimental opera had its world premiere production by Hinge/Works Modern Opera in 2016 at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine. She now works regularly with composer Marianna Filippi on a variety of environmentally-themed new music compositions, including a synesthetic exploration of a day in the life of an octopus and a work for 8 cellos and chorus written in the voice of a glacier.
She has written and directed interactive street theater for the sea level rise consciousness-raising group King Tide Party and collaborated on site-specific performances about healing and sound. Her dramatic and operatic work as co- founder of Hinge/Works has been staged as part of the PortFringe Festival, the Sacred and Profane Festival, and the Belfast Poetry Festival.
Megan also edits the weekly poetry column Deep Water in the Portland Press Herald; serves as Reviews Editor for The Café Review, a poetry and arts journal; and wrote theater and film criticism for the Portland Phoenix from 2004 until the alt-weekly’s sad final demise in 2024. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, frequently leads writing workshops and tutorials, and offers manuscript consultations and editing services to a range of authors. She earned a Master’s Degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University’s School of Journalism, and studied oral history, ethnography, and American Studies as an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College.
Megan’s work is strongly influenced by the natural world, stories, and documentary modes. She has written a portrait-in-verse of an old Maine woodsman; explored the significance of gold in America through the voices of three historical figures; and contemplated how we inhabit the vessels of a neighborhood, a body, and the deep and precarious blue.
Learn more at megangrumbling.com.
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