Martha Moffett, Biography

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Fifth Martha * First Running Composer * Phil Ochs Plays Chess
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"Moffett is never boring." -- Miller Williams, poet, translator, founder of University of Arkansas Press

Bio note from Chattahoochee Review:

MARTHA LEATHERWOOD MOFFETT was born at the end of a dirt road in St. Clair County, Alabama, was a student in Hudson Strode's writing class at the University of Alabama, then worked in publishing in New York City (GQ, The Weekly People, The Book of Knowledge, American Heritage Dictionary, Ladies' Home Journal). She returned to a small southern town (Lantana, Florida, another dirt road), where she was chief librarian at the National Enquirer for many years. When asked what it was like, she says, "It's like being thrown into a Victorian workhouse."

She has written in several forms -- children's books (A Flower Pot Is Not a Hat), novels (The Common Garden; Keepaway), short stories and essays (Cosmopolitan, New York Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, British Heritage). She does some ghostwriting, most recently an autobiography of the inventor of Technicolor, who was already dead and couldn't say, "That doesn't sound like me."

Awards: Two Florida State Council on the Arts individual fellowships, one for short fiction and one for playwriting, and a Yaddo fellowship. She took her play to Edward Albee's play lab in Alaska, which she describes as "the best ten days of my life." A novella in the Chattahoochee Review was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2000. Her current novel, A Private Viewing, was workshopped at Recursos de Santa Fe in Kevin McIlvoy's writing workshop.