Maureen Brady

Apr 28

Maureen Brady has published the novels Ginger’s Fire (Harrington Park, 2003); Getaway (Bacon Press, 2018); Folly (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2016); and Give Me Your Good Ear (Spinsters Book Co., 1979).

Folly was nominated by Adrienne Rich for the American Library Association’s Gay Book Award and reissued as a classic by the Feminist Press. Give Me Your Good Ear was published both in the US and by the UK’s Women’s Press and Alice Walker said of it, “The writing was so good, I heard it all.” Daybreak has remained in print since 1991 and sold over 51,000 copies, and Midlife was translated into German and Dutch.

She has also published a collection of short stories, The Question She Put to Herself; and the nonfiction books Daybreak: Meditations for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse; Midlife: Meditations for Women; and Beyond Survival.

Brady’s work has brought her many awards and grants from: New York Foundation of the Arts; NYSCA Writer-in-Residence; Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation; VCCA scholarship residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland; and residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Arts, and Villa Montalvo.

Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies, most recently an essay in Bellevue Literary Review Fall 2024; essays and stories in Sinister Wisdom; Saints and Sinners; Just Like A Girl; Cabbage and Bones: Irish American Women’s Fiction; Mom; In the Family; Intersections: An Anthology of Banff Writers, and others. Brady’s essays and stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and were finalists for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Nelson Algren Short Story contest. She won the 2015 Saints and Sinners Short Story Award and was runner up for that award in 2018.

She co-founded one of the first feminist presses in the 1970s, Spinsters Ink, and served for twenty years on the board of Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, many of them as president.

An adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at New York University’s School of Professional Studies for over twenty years, she also teaches with the Peripatetic Writing Workshop in various locations around the world.

She lives with her partner of thirty years, Martha, and their joy dog, Georgie, between New York City and Woodstock, New York. She also frequents a charming town on the Kentish Coast of England. She likes to garden, walk, and carve spoons in her spare time.