Marjorie Gowdy writes at home in the Blue Ridge mountains. Gowdy was Founding Executive
Director of The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, MS, which she led for 18 years. Now
retired, she worked in other fields that fed her love of writing, including as a grants writer. Her
poetry has been published in Artemis Journal, Floyd County Moonshine, Valley Voices
(Mississippi Valley State University), Moonstone Arts Center’s books Haiku and Struggle for
Liberty, Indolent Books, Clinch River Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature,
Visitant-Lit, RockPaperPoem, the book Quilted Poems, with art in the spring 2022 issue of
Orange Peel Magazine and the 2021-22 Gallerium: Extinction catalog. She has three poems in
The Journal of the Writers’ Guild of Virginia. This fall, Gowdy’s poems will be published in
Friends’ Journal, the international magazine of the Quakers, in Streetlight, and in the new print
issue of Boats Against the Current. Her chapbook, Inflorescence, will be published in spring
2023 by Finishing Line Press. Her essays are included in Katrina: Mississippi Women Remember
(2007). Gowdy also paints, with recent works accepted by the Virginia Beach Artists' Center,
illustrations published in Floyd County Moonshine and in Artemis Journal (a visual poem). Her
painting “Night Swim,” is the cover art for the Spring 2022 issue of Barely South. Gowdy is a
summa cum laude graduate of Virginia Tech and has a master's degree in liberal studies from
University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Her work is informed by the tumbled Virginia
mountains as well as her time on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and along the coasts of Virginia and
North Carolina. She is currently newsletter editor for the Poetry Society of Virginia. Gowdy lives
in Callaway, VA, USA. marjie01@gmail.com, blueridgehome.net

More information is available about Gowdy in the Virginia Poets’ Database:
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/virginiapoets/westcentral/poets/11/?fbclid=IwAR1oNVelnvv
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