Maria Terrone's second book of poetry, A Secret Room in Fall, won the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was published in December 2006.  Her first book, The Bodies We Were Loaned, appeared from The Word Works in 2002. Terrone’s work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in such magazines as Poetry, The Hudson Review, Crab Orchard Review, Margie, Rhino, Rattapallax, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review and Poetry International. She is the recipient of the Willow Review Award for Poetry, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North, and the Allen Tate Memorial Award from Wind.  In 2007, she received an Individual Artist Initiative Award from the Queens Council on the Arts.

Her work also has appeared in several national anthologies, including The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line Press), The Heart of Autumn (Beacon Press), The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (The Feminist Press), and Sweet Lemons: Writing with a Sicilian Accent (Legas, 2004).  In June 2005, she was profiled in the Iranian literary supplement Hengam by Mohsen Fathizade, a young writer who discovered her work on the Web and is now translating her first book into Farsi. 

A lifelong New Yorker, Maria is assistant vice president for communications at Queens College of the City University of New York. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her husband, Bill, a physics teacher.

What’s My Poetry About?

In my work, I often try to bring into the light and give voice to anonymous people in the shadows—an early-twentieth-century child factory worker; a woman employed by a paint company to name colors; faceless individuals exchanging urgent messages through a police scanner. They are striving, perhaps unconsciously, for beauty and transcendence.

As an Italian American whose maternal grandfather helped dig the first subway, I'm also drawn to themes of family, ethnicity, migration, and the deepest substrata of our urban environment. I think of the subway, a place I inhabit daily and the source of my earliest memories, as a kind of living Pompeii, where our deepest longings and buried thoughts find expression. As a resident of Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, where "old Americans" and the newest immigrants live side by side, I have rich inspiration for my work. How do all of these themes intersect and influence my identity and our collective identity as Americans? These are some of the subjects that I explore in my poetry, which aspires to its own beauty and transcendence, while, I hope, always remaining accessible.