Maegan Poland is a fiction writer and an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
She received her PhD in English from the University of Nevada, where she was a Black Mountain Institute PhD Fellow. She also holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Mississippi, as well as a BFA in Writing for Screen & Television from the University of Southern California, where she was a Trustee Scholar.
Her debut short story collection What Makes You Think You’re Awake? won the Bakwin Award at Blair Press and was featured on The Millions’ Most Anticipated for June 2021. Her writing has been published in Pleiades, Mississippi Review, Juked, Beloit Fiction Journal, Notre Dame Review, Day One, LitHub, and elsewhere. She received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize XL anthology for her story “Spores,” and she was named a Tin House Scholar at the 2018 Winter Workshop. In 2019, her story “Milking” was a finalist in the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, and she received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation to support her writing. She has served as Fiction Editor for Witness magazine, and as a Managing Editor for Yalobusha Review.
Currently, she is working on a novel.