MAXINE SCATES

Featured September 17, 2005

Maxine Scates is the author of Black Loam which received the Lyre Prize, and Toluca Street which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her poems have appeared widely or are forthcoming in such journals as American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and ZYZZYVA.

Scates writes: “Since I have lived in Oregon since 1973  my poems often refer to the natural world or how we co-exist with it.  However, the first twenty three years of my life were spent in Los Angeles. I grew up a mile from Los Angeles International airport in a working class household -- my father was a World War II vet and my mother a clerk in a library -- and because she worked in a library I came to books in the first place.  My father's war experiences defined and limited his life, a traumatized alcoholic his own unhappiness dominated the lives around him.  My poetry often refers to the lives of both of my parents and is rooted in the belief that there lives are and were important enough to be heard. My own experience as a writer suggests that it is the act of writing, and in this instance, the act of writing poetry, that has capacity to transform often difficult experience rooted in the secrets and sometimes the shame of families into narratives that listeners and readers will often, I hope, recognize as their own.” 
 
Scates has also received fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Caldera, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Literary Arts, Writer-in-Residence at both Lewis and Clark and Reed College. She has been poetry editor of Northwest Review, and taught at the Northwest Writing Institute, Mountain Writers Center and Lane Community College.