Margaree Little

Margaree Little is the author of Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Since receiving a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award in 2013, she has received a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship and a Kenyon Review Fellowship, among other awards. She is currently working on her second manuscript, which incorporates poems and pen and watercolor images; she is also working on two collections of translations from the Russian of Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam. She lives in Tucson and teaches at Pima Community College.

The Value of Support

"When I was in graduate school, my teacher Mary Szybist—one of the first recipients of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award—told me that I should approach my writing with the discipline I would bring to any other work. What she meant, she explained, was that as women we are conditioned and expected to put so much else first, to give our time and energy away to others before we give it to our own writing. For me, receiving a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award in 2013 was crucial not only in the support at the time, which allowed me to complete my first book and begin the tentative, searching work toward my second manuscript in progress. It also gave me the courage to make this choice: to respect the gift of my writing, and to believe in it."