Maureen Seaton, the lesbian poet and memoirist whose books include the Lambda Literary Award winners Furious Cooking and Sex Talks to Girls, died on August 26, 2023.
Born on October 20, 1947, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Seaton earned an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College in 1996. In Chicago she taught poetry as artist-in-residence at Columbia College and taught in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later taught creative writing at the University of Miami, where she was a professor. Collaboration was central to her work, and she co-wrote books with Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, Kristine Snodgrass, Aaron Smith, and others. Her honors included the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the 2019 Florida Book Award for Poetry.
Fear of Subways (1991), winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, was described by a reviewer in The Nation as a sustained look at the poet’s place, as a white woman, in the lives of Black people.
The Sea Among the Cupboards (1992) is a bold, melodic and candid collection of poems that won the Capricorn Poetry Prize.
Furious Cooking (1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, moves between romantic, sardonic and confrontational moods, with heat as a recurring image. Its poems pair opposites, revisit violence and its aftermath, take aim at hypocrisy in religious institutions and in relationships, and reflect on the deaths of loved ones.
Little Ice Age (2001) was published by Invisible Cities Press in its Contemporary Classics Poetry series.
Venus Examines Her Breast (2004) won the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.
Sex Talks to Girls (2008), a memoir, recasts Seaton as “Molly Meek” and follows her through religion, sex, sobriety and motherhood, from near-nun to fully sexual adult. It won a Lambda Literary Award and was reissued in paperback in 2018.
Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (2009) travels from the womb to the Florida sunshine, with poems about narrow escapes and imperfect endings and a road trip in a Beetle said to be able to float.
America Loves Carney (2009) is a chapbook and the winner of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition.
Enjoy Hot or Iced Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (2011), a chapbook from Slapering Hol Press written with Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon, follows relationships that have gone bad.
Genetics (2012) gathers poems on womanhood, family roots and an evolving life.
Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems (1991-2011) (2013) collects poems from two decades and seven earlier books, along with new sequences that mix mathematics and surreal violence with tragicomic human struggle.
Tit, with Blue Guitar (2016) is a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press.
Fisher (2018) is an elegy for a beloved friend and one-time lover who died by suicide.
Sweet World (2019) gathers poems about life during breast cancer treatment and won the 2019 Florida Book Award for Poetry.
Undersea (2021) is a series of love-note poems to Florida and the sea.
The Sky Is an Elephant (2023) is a shaggy dog story in poems that blends an imaginary playmate and near-death antics with a meditation on the body and the soul, and pays homage to Jack Spicer and Federico García Lorca.
The collection also includes her chapbook Miss Molly Rockin, published by Thorngate Road.
Seaton’s work also appears in five anthologies in the collection: Judith Barrington’s An Intimate Wilderness, Catherine Reid and Holly Iglesias’s Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved (1997), Susan Fox Rogers and Linda Smukler’s Portraits of Love (1997), Lilian Mohin’s Not for the Academy (1998), and Bryan Borland’s Lady Business (2012).
Complete Bibliography
Poetry: Fear of Subways (1991), The Sea Among the Cupboards (1992), Furious Cooking (1996), Little Ice Age (2001), Venus Examines Her Breast (2004), Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (2009), America Loves Carney (2009), Genetics (2012), Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems (1991-2011) (2013), Tit, with Blue Guitar (2016), Fisher (2018), Sweet World (2019), Undersea (2021), The Sky Is an Elephant (2023)
Memoir: Sex Talks to Girls (2008; reissued 2018)
Collaborations and edited volumes: Exquisite Politics, with Denise Duhamel (1997); Oyl, with Denise Duhamel (2000); Little Novels, with Denise Duhamel (2002); Facial Geometry, with Neil de la Flor and Kristine Snodgrass (2006); Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, edited with Denise Duhamel and David Trinidad (2007); Stealth, with Samuel Ace (2011); Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor (2011); Two Thieves & a Liar, with Neil de la Flor and Kristine Snodgrass; Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations, with Denise Duhamel (2015); Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos, edited with Neil de la Flor (2018); Myth America, with Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina and Holly Iglesias (2020); Zero-Zero, with Kristine Snodgrass (2021); Tilt / Beautiful People, with Denise Duhamel and Aaron Smith (published posthumously).
See also, When I Was Straight: A Tribute To Maureen Seaton, edited by Dustin Brookshire.
Seaton died on August 26, 2023, at age 75, after a long illness. She is survived by her partner, Lori Anderson, whom she called her significant other and whose energy she credited in her own writing on collaboration, and by her two daughters. Friends and collaborators held memorial readings in her honor, including “Sweet World: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton” at the Miami Book Fair on November 19, 2023, hosted by Denise Duhamel and Nicole Tallman.