Mary Austin Speaker

Mary Austin Speaker is the Creative Director of Milkweed Editions. Before joining Milkweed’s staff in 2017, Mary worked in New York trade publishing for ten years, managing the Ecco and Smithsonian imprints for HarperCollins Publishers and designing for Simon & Schuster. She co-founded and curated the Triptych Poetry Series in the East Village, and while studying for her MFA in poetry at Indiana University, she taught creative writing and edited the Indiana Review. She has published two collections of poetry—Ceremony (Slope Editions, 2013) and The Bridge (Shearsman Books, 2016).

I work at Milkweed because their list celebrates poetry, ecology, and diversity, and because they prize the making of beautiful books and are tireless, sincere champions for their authors.