About

Madeleine Mysko is the author of two novels, Bringing Vincent Home (Plain View Press, 2007) and Stone Harbor Bound (Bridle Path Press, 2015), and a poetry collection, Crucial Blue, (Cherry Grove Collections, 2019).

Her poetry, reviews, essays, and short fiction have been published widely in literary journals that include Shenandoah, Commonweal, Presence, River Styx, and The Hudson Review. As a peace and justice activist, she has also contributed op-ed pieces to venues including The Baltimore Sun and The Veteran.

Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Madeleine Mysko attended parochial schools and graduated from Mercy Hospital School of Nursing in 1967. During the Vietnam War, she served in the Army Nurse Corps on the famous burn ward of Brooke Army Medical Center, an experience out of which she later wrote her first novel, Bringing Vincent Home. When she later returned to college, she majored in literature and writing. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Rosemont College, and master’s degrees from both The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University and The George Washington University.

In 2015, she published her second novel, Stone Harbor Bound, a lyrical novel set in Stone Harbor. New Jersey.

For years she has taught creative writing, both poetry and fiction, in the Baltimore-Washington area. As a nurse, she has worked in Assisted Living at a Baltimore retirement community. She has also worked as a waitress—a short career she wrote about in The Baltimore Sun when her “Real Life” pieces would appear regularly in the Modern Life section. For years she also served as coordinating editor of the Reflections column for the American Journal of Nursing.

Among her awards are two Individual Artist grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, scholarships from Sewanee Writers Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and an Artscape Prize for Fiction from the City of Baltimore.

In December 2021 the Baltimore County Historical Society awarded an Artist's Relief Grant in the literary category to Madeleine Mysko for her essay, A Pilgrimage to East Towson.