Margot Kahn's debut collection of poetry, The Unreliable Tree, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in September 2025. Her chapbook, A Quiet Day with the West on Fire (Floating Bridge), was a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition. Her biography of champion cowboy Bill Smith, Horses That Buck (University of Oklahoma), won a Walter Marvin Rumsey Grant and the High Plains Book Award. Together with Kelly McMasters, she is co-editor of the New York Times Editors’ Choice anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press) and the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Home (Catapult). Together with her teenage son, Toby, she produces the podcast Ferry Talk.

Margot earned her MFA from Columbia University and has received support from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, the Jack Straw Writers Program, Washington State’s Artist Trust, Ohioana Library, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Willa Cather Foundation, among other places. Originally from Ohio, she lives in the Pacific Northwest where she hikes, bakes, and writes about next generation technology. 

CONTACT: margotkahn at gmail dot com

Photo Credit: Mary Grace Long