New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith distills creativity and the craft of writing with a practical guide perfect for fans of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NPR Best Book of the Year - Time Best Book of the Year - Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year

A bittersweet study in both grief and joy. ---Time

A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age--from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.

Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman's personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is extraordinary (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

Good Bones, the collection that took the internet by storm in 2017, is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. There is a light, she tells us, and the light is good. Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake. These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

Maggie Smith, bestselling author of the viral poem Good Bones and the memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, delivers a lyrical and reassuring picture book perfect for calming active minds at bedtime (or anytime).

A Today Show Spring Pick!

At bedtime, when lights go out...sometimes thoughts stay on.

Scary things and worries flutter and flap around. It's so hard to sleep!

But a little imagination (and a lot of love) can create a cozy nest for happy thoughts--and sweet dreams for little ones.

The NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the author of YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL

A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief. --NPR
A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side. --The Boston Globe
Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal. --People

For fans of Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life's challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience.

When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem Good Bones, started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment. --Time
A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet. --People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her meditations on kindness and hope (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life--a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son's pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road--she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone doesn't observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.​

Slate called Smith's superpower as a writer her ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty. The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NPR Best Book of the Year - Time Best Book of the Year - Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year

A bittersweet study in both grief and joy. ---Time

A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age--from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.

Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman's personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is extraordinary (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

First published in 1995 by Orchard Books, this book takes one baby, two dogs, and three bicycles on a journey from the big city to Maine's seacoast. Objects packed for the trip and things seen along the way are all happily counted, finishing in a shining finale as the family tallies 20 fireflies found during their last evening in Maine.

Poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman's personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. T...

A smart, twisty cat-and-mouse revenge tale.

- Robert Dugoni, NY Times Best Selling Author of the Tracy Crosswhite series

An ambitious district attorney. An enemy she can't see. A daughter at risk.

From the author of the award-winning Truth and Other Lies comes a gripping suspense novel about an ambitious prosecutor on the hunt for her sadistic stalker, only to find herself framed for murder when he turns up dead.

Rachel Matthews is used to stress-from the cutthroat world of the district attorney's office to her escalating clashes with her teenage daughter. So when a stranger sends a lavish bouquet with a macabre message and leaves a disturbing video on her doorstep, she's quick to act. Teaming up with an old classmate turned private investigator, she wades through old case files, searching for someone harboring a grudge against her.

But before she has time to pinpoint a suspect, her stalker issues a demand-he wants money, lots of it, or he'll hurt her daughter. In a dangerous gamble, Rachel agrees to meet her stalker on an isolated beach, only to find herself fleeing from a shocking crime scene. Can she solve the puzzle of who wants to destroy her before she loses her family, her career, and her freedom?

Fans of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent will embrace this taut tale of long-simmering revenge right up to its surprising and twisty climax.

Here in Maggie Smith's first book we encounter a voice that is spare, confident, and precise. Her images click into place, and the movement of each poem is deft, muscular, taut. These are poems we trust, poems that ask hard questions while at the same time convincing us of the magic in the world. Smith's voice is reserved, yet she carries her world forward in her teeth, so to speak. There's wisdom and acceptance in many of the poems, coupled with a willingness to utter what she does not understand, a recognition 'that worse happens to better than I.' She embraces the mystery. There's a kinship with the Ohio landscape, but also the recognition that 'darkness ploughs its furrows here.' These are poems that do not flinch in the face of grief while at the same time they do not give into formulas that either comfort or accuse. I admire the courage and the control, the gorgeous turns, the leaps she takes in the poems while keeping the center of each poem intact. These are poems that do not wobble; the voice is confident and secure, the authority claimed, and the darkness met head on-'mealy, and bitter' but as she writes in 'The Poem Speaks to Danger': 'I am the mouth/that can hold more . . . the globe // of some new, ready fruit.' This is a book that delights, intrigues, and instructs. A wonderful debut.

-Carol Potter

In Maggie Smith's Disasterology the poems lie down and make angels in the fallout as a tide of fire drags everything away. Whip smart and darkly funny, Smith chronicles how disaster proves itself time after time, film after film, yet another doom after doomsday. But everything is not one red phone ringing away from ruin. There is a future still waiting to be said, a hope that the pear trees will outlast us, bright, unending, maybe even sweet. -Traci Brimhall As with the Hollywood hairdos of her poems' heroines, no strand is out of place in Maggie Smith's fraught and funny new chapbook. Smith brings her characteristic crispness and smarts to questions of disaster, large and small, with poems that expertly snake through iconic films, color-coded terror alerts, and the bleakest of daydreams. Read it, and read it fast-tomorrow we might all be gone. -Natalie Shapero

WINNER, 2022 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE JUROR'S GRAND PRIZE

WINNER, 2022 AMERICAN WRITING AWARDS BEST DEBUT FICTION

WINNER 2022 FOREWARD REVIEW INDIES GOLD MEDAL ADULT FICTION

The Devil Wears Prada meets All the President's Men

Megan Barnes' life is in free fall. After losing both her job as a reporter and her boyfriend in the same day, she retreats to Chicago and moves in with Helen, her over-protective mother. Before long, the two are clashing over everything from pro-choice to #MeToo, not to mention Helen's run for U.S. Congress, which puts Megan's career on hold until after the election.

Desperate to reboot her life, Megan gets her chance when an altercation at a campus rally brings her face-to-face with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jocelyn Jones, who offers her a job on her PR team. Before long, Megan is pulled into the heady world of fame and glamour her charismatic new mentor represents.

Until an anonymous tweet brings it all crashing down. To salvage Jocelyn's reputation, Megan must locate the online troll and expose the lies. But when the trail leads to blackmail, and circles back to her own mother, Megan realizes if she pulls any harder on this thread, what should have been the scoop of her career could unravel into a tabloid nightmare.

Readers who love Jodi Picoult's topical plot twists and Liane Moriarty's character-driven novels will devour this fast-paced tale of three women whose lives converge as one fights a devastating accusation, another campaigns for a contested seat in Congress, and one, the young reporter with ties to both, navigates the tricky line between secrets and lies.

Sir Titus Salt built a mill and village in 1853 that continues to be named after him. Already a successful worsted manufacturer in Bradford, his decision to build a huge 'vertical' mill commenced a pattern of intertwined fortunes between Salt's Mill and Saltaire's residents, one that has continued. It housed all processes from treating raw wool to finishing quality worsted materials, alongside houses and community amenities for his workers. Ownership of Salts Mill initially passed to Salt's fifth son but went into voluntary administration in 1892. The mill was rescued and prospered under the ownership of Sir James Roberts until 1918, when family and business tragedies resulted in his sale of Salts Mill to a consortium of Bradford businessmen. During lean times for the textile trade in the 1920s, the private company of Salts Mill was floated as a public company and success returned to the mill. This led to record dividends in 1956, resulting in a dramatic take over by Illingworth, Morris - a company founded by the Ostrer family, who grew a global, multi-national textile company, retaining their headquarters at Salts Mill until textile production ceased. The twists, turns and dramas at Salts Mill are recounted in this book.

Poetry. Modelled on the famous United States competition, the third annual Best New British and Irish Poets competition was open to any poet of British or Irish citizenship and/or UK or Irish residency who has not yet published or will not publish a full-length collection of poetry. This anthology comprises work by some of the biggest rising stars and new talents in these isles.

This book explores the range of significant events that took place in some of the most important public buildings conceived and established by Sir Titus Salt and his fifth son, Titus Salt Junior, as part of his vision for the industrial community of Saltaire. From as early as 1855 Salt had ensured that public space was available to the new and growing community of Saltaire through the building of a Dining Hall, opposite the Mill. Conceived as a building to provide cheap meals for the workforce, its extensive space was also to initially house a 'factory school', a library, a reading room, be the venue for topical or political meetings, entertainment and much more. Between 1868 and 1872 the building of residential houses in Saltaire was accompanied by the erection of some important public buildings on either side of what was named Victoria Road. These public buildings were intended to provide for children's education, suitable adult leisure and self-improvement pursuits, health care and the teaching of art and science. The Technical Institute, Exhibition Building and the Infirmary/Hospital - in common with the Dining Hall - all witnessed events over time that reflected significant political, economic and social upheaval and change. The events that took place within these prominent buildings - still standing today - and the times that forged them provide a rich tapestry of social history from the Victorian era to modern times.