About
Poet Maggie Smith is your guide on the pathways to feel and understand our common journey – through poetry. In sharing poems, we take a moment to pause and acknowledge the world’s magnitude, and how poets illuminate that mystery. Join The Slowdown for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode, every weekday. Produced by APM Studios in partnership with The Poetry Foundation and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Production Team
Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and her latest, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. The People’s Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward, an anthology Smith coedited with Saeed Jones, will be published by Washington Square Press/Atria in September 2025. A Suit or a Suitcase, Smith’s next collection of poems, will be published by Washington Square Press/Atria in March 2026.
Smith has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and numerous grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Best American Poetry. She is on the MFA faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, and she writes about craft in her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet. (Photo by Devon Albeit)
Myka Kielbon
Myka Kielbon is the lead producer of The Slowdown. She previously was a producer on the team of Blind Landing, an independent podcast on the world of elite sports. Her work in multiple disciplines has appeared with LAist, KCRW, the Altadena Poetry Review, High Noon, Feast, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
Maria Württele
Maria Württele is an Associate Producer at APM Studios, working primarily on The Slowdown. She was previously a producer on podcasts like Girl Tales and Call to Mind; a production coordinator at Ten Percent Happier and ZigZag; and a sound designer at various regional theaters. In her free time, Maria is usually reading, obsessing over movies, or hanging out with her pup, Jackson.
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