She grew up fifteen minutes south of Lake Michigan in Valparaiso, Indiana, where she loved playing basketball and star-gazing at the Indiana Dunes. She holds a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from Indiana University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and she has been a resident at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, at Firefly Farms outside Knoxville, Tennessee, and at the Union League Club of Chicago Library. Maggie has been an English teacher, an environmental educator in Alabama, a farmhand in California, a radio DJ, and in 2015, she took four cross-country road trips. Currently she is a Field Guide at New Vision Wilderness in the Wisconsin North Woods, where she co-leads backpacking trips for teens in wilderness therapy.