Maureen Owen

Maureen Owen’s interview narrates her background in Minnesota, California, and Japan where she lived with Lauren Owen before moving to New York City in the late 1960s where she became an integral part of the small press publishing scene and a key administrator at The Poetry Project. Owen describes in detail her editing and publishing of Telephone magazine and Telephone Books, how the community around The Poetry Project propelled that work, and her relation to the term ‘New York School.’ Key topics of discussions are Owen’s role in building a more inclusive publishing community for women, her career in publishing, arts admin, and small press distribution, and her teaching career at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The interview concludes with Owen’s poem ‘…the beauty of the air…’.