Maureen was born in Ferryhill, County Durham, in 1945 and moved to Teesside at the age of two. Her childhood days were spent ‘below the railway’ in Thornaby. She now lives in Yarm with her husband and has one grown-up daughter.

A former personnel manager, she began writing poetry in 1992. In 2001 she gained the Higher Education Diploma in creative writing and literature from the University of Leeds. She studied for her MA in poetry at the University of Newcastle and graduated in December 2002. She is now undertaking a creative writing PhD at the University of Newcastle, based on the work of the Roman poet, Horace.

Maureen works in schools and as an adult education tutor. She has held residencies with BBC Radio Cleveland; Northern Disability Arts Forum at the Calvert Trust, Kielder Reservoir, Northumberland; Hexham Mini LitFest; Stockton online; Newcastle Education Action Zone; Sunderland Education Action Zone; St. Luke’s Hospital, Middlesbrough; and the Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool. She has run workshops on behalf of the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, and for the University of Teesside. As part of the Museum of our Lives project she has been poet-in-residence at the Museum of Antiquities, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and has subsequently been commissioned to write a collection of poems for the museum.

Maureen’s publications include: Tailor Tacks (Mudfog, 1999), Oyster Baby (Biscuit, 2002), The Works, (Biscuit, 2004) and Tongues in Trees (New Writing North, 2005).

The Works is included in the Primary Texts Reading List for Oxford University Course, ‘The Reception of Classical Literature in Twentieth-Century Poetry in English’ and Oyster Baby is included in ‘Other Relevant Poetry with Classical Connections; (b) Living and Recent Poets for Oxford University Course, ‘The Reception of Classical Literature in Twentieth-Century Poetry in English’.

Her work was also cited in The Cambridge Companion to Horace (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and she will be featured in the forthcoming edition of The Classical Presences series to be published by Oxford University Press.

In September, 2007 Maureen recorded a programme for BBC Radio 3 where she reads from her Horace versions. The programme is scheduled to be broadcast in the week commencing 17 December 2007.

In addition to numerous public readings, Maureen has presented her work on Horace at the University of Durham, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Oxford University (Corpus Christi College), UCL and the Open University at Milton Keynes.