Lauren Marie Schmidt made her first appearance for South End Writes on July 14, 2020 when, during an event featuring her partner, the poet Martin Espada, she handed him their little fluffy dog while she searched the floor for an outlet to recharge a laptop being used in the poetry reading. The dog won a brief but decisive victory over poetry in the battle for audience attention.
Lauren Marie Schmidt will again join South End Writes to read from her latest collection, Filthy Labors, on Tuesday, January 26 at 7:00 PM. She will be introduced by Martin Espada. No word yet on whether the dog will make an appearance.
A native of New Jersey, Schmidt was moved by the misfortune of others from an early age. She won her first poetry competition writing about homelessness when she was in fifth grade. Decades later, her newest book, Filthy Labors, draws on her work as a volunteer creative writing instructor at a transitional housing program for mothers experiencing homelessness. Her first collection of poetry, Psalms of The Dining Room, was inspired by her observations as a volunteer at a soup kitchen in Eugene, OR, where she lived for five years. Two previous collections of poetry include Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing and The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series. Her other awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, The Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review’s Vilcek Prize for Poetry.
In addition to her poetry collections, Schmidt’s work has appeared in North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, The Progressive, and other journals.
According to a 2018 interview with The Massachusetts Review, Schmidt has stepped away from poetry to focus on writing a Young Adult novel loosely based on the notorious 2012 Steubenville, OH rape case involving members of a high school football team who assaulted an inebriated female student at a party and published images of the attack on social media. “I wanted to examine how the conditions for Steubenville could have been created,” Schmidt said during the interview. “I wanted to know why, out of all those boys, no one stepped up and said, ‘Hey, man, you shouldn’t do that---that’s fucked up.’ What I’m writing has very little to do with the rape itself, though it’s hinted at or directly mentioned in every chapter; rather, it’s a look into how something like this could have happened at all.”
The author, who holds several Masters degrees, including an MFA from Antioch University, teaches English at a college-prep school, The Academy, in Charlemont, MA, .
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