Margot Kahn is a poet, biographer, essayist, and editor. Her 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. Horses That Buck (University of Oklahoma), her biography of rodeo legend “Cody” Bill Smith, won a Walter Marvin Rumsey Grant and the High Plains Book Award. Her essays, poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in BUST, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker, among other places.

Together with Kelly McMasters, Margot is co-editor of two anthologies—the New York Times Editors’ Choice anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press) and the indie national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). She 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, Margot lives in the Pacific Northwest where she hikes, bakes, co-produces the podcast Ferry Talk with her teenage son, and writes about next generation technology. 

CONTACT: margotkahn at gmail dot com

Photo Credit: Mary Grace Long