Margaret Mackinnon grew up in the South in a family with strong roots in Virginia and North Carolina. She attended Vassar College and the University of North Carolina, and completed the graduate creative writing program at the University of Florida. She has lived and traveled extensively in Japan, Mexico, and Scotland.

She has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include a Simon Daro Dawidowicz Poetry Award from Florida International University, the Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize from Florida State University, and the Graybill-Gowen Poetry Award from Washington & Lee University and Shenandoah. Honors received from the Poetry Society of Virginia include the Ellen Anderson Memorial Reading Award and the Cenie H. Moon Prize. Her first book, The Invented Child, received the Gerald Cable Book Award and was published in 2013 by Silverfish Review Press. The Invented Child won the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry from the Library of Virginia. A chapbook, Naming the Natural World, won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize and will be published in 2018.

Her work has appeared in many journals, including Image, Poetry, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. She lives with her husband and daughter in Richmond, VA.

All photos used on this site were taken by Margaret.