Margaret Hasse papers

Margaret Mary Hasse was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1950. Soon after, her family moved to Vermillion, South Dakota, where her father was on the mathematics department faculty and also taught astronomy at the University of South Dakota. Margaret’s mother, Gladys Irene Elizabeth Hasse, was a life-long diarist and poet who published in journals such as the South Dakota Review. Hasse received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1973, and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1983, both in English.

Hasse is author of five collections of poetry, including Stars Above, Stars Below (1984), In a Sheep’s Eye, Darling (1988), Milk and Tides (2008), Earth’s Appetite (2013), and Between Us (2016). Three of her collections were finalists for the Minnesota Book Award. Milk and Tides won the 2009 Midwest Independent Publishers Association poetry award. She is editor of See My Message and Come Home: An Anthology of poetry from the Minnesota Poets in the Schools (1978), Secret Traffic: Selected Poems by Roy McBride (2013), and A Little Book of Abundance: Poems of Gratitude throughout the Year (2016). She has received two Loft-McKnight fellowships in poetry, two Minnesota State Arts Board poetry grants, two Jerome Foundation poetry grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Margaret Hasse’s professional life as a teaching poet, arts administrator, and arts consultant in the areas of planning and fundraising has brought her in contact with many Twin Cities’ arts organizations, including COMPAS (Community Programs in the Arts and Sciences), Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education, The Loft Literary Center, Perpich Center for Arts Education, Walker Art Center, and SASE: the Write Place. She has curated literary reading series at ArtStart and Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts and performed her poetry in many settings, including in The Loft’s Writers on Stage program, directed by Ben Krielkamp.