Mary Maxwell is the author of six volumes of poetry, An Imaginary Hellas, Emporia, Cultural Tourism, Nine Over Sixes, Oral Lake and Word Suites, all published by LongNookBooks. Individual poems originally appeared in Agni, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Provincetown Arts, Salmagundi, Southern Review, Slate and Yale Review. A winner of the 1990 “Discovery”/The Nation Award, she has been the recipient of a residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She has also been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

As an independent scholar she has published her essays and reviews in literary periodicals such as Arion, Boston Review, Partisan Review, Revel, and Threepenny Review. Co-editor and contributor to The Longnook Overlook: A Review of the Arts, she is also the author of a monograph about the painter Serena Rothstein, Discourse in Paint.

A collection of talks and writings on the subject of prosody and poetic translation is forthcoming. Her own translations of Provençal, Latin and Classical Greek poetry have appeared in The American Voice, Literary Imagination, Pequod, Vanitas, The Washington Post Book World and the anthology, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. She is a contributor to Oxford University Press's Sulpicia: A Woman's Voice from Ancient Rome and The Routledge Companion to Ezra Pound.

She has completed a volume of nonfiction about the genesis and meaning of the movie, The Night of the Hunter, whose origins can be traced back to her childhood hometown of Clarksburg, West Virginia. Sections recently appeared in Raritan.