About Mary Ann McFadden

Ventura County Poet Laureate 

Mary Ann McFadden lives on a citrus ranch outside of Fillmore and is an award-winning author of two books of poetry, Eye of the Blackbird and Devil, Dear.  She taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, 

and has given workshops at The New York City Libraries and at the Biblioteca in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  

She is described as a poet with a “sustained vision of her family’s past and its ongoing presence in herself.”

Her earliest memories are of living with her mother on her grandparents’ citrus ranch in Simi Valley. After her mother remarried, they moved to her family’s citrus ranch in Fillmore where she attended school. 

Her father died in World War II.  She never knew him.  The poet within set to work, reconstructing who he must have been.  

Here is an excerpt from a poem about herself as a child awakening at dawn: 

               “And now like a mist almost not discerned,

the first cheeps of the early birds beginning far away in the fields,

               moving across the earth to us,

lit like a caravan with its rich-robed musicians and its proud kings.

And I am proud of this turning, this sweep of delight

             that falls over me,

             glad to be a child of it, one of its steeples.

Out of my father’s bones, in green grass, in weeds in fields

               of gravestones

              in Southern France,

dark now, resting, I not separate from this, I wake up

              and try to grow.”