Maxine Swann
American writer
Maxine Swann (born February 11, 1969) is an American fiction author.
Life
Swann grew up on a farm in southern Pennsylvania, before attending Phillips Academy and then Columbia College, where she studied Comparative Literature (French and German) and creative writing with Mary Gordon, graduating in 1994.
She pursued her graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Université de Paris VII, earning her master's degree in 1997 with a thesis on the style of Marcel Proust. She now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Insights into her 2001 move to Argentina, divorce and life as an ex-pat writer were the subject of a "At Home Abroad" column of The New York Times on June 19, 2008.
Work
Swann's work first appeared in Ploughshares, in an issue guest-edited by Mary Gordon, and she won a Cohen Award for that short story, "Flower Children", in 1997. The same story won her an O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and selection by The Best American Short Stories.
At the time, Ploughshares quoted her: "All stories, I think, are in the end a very dense mixture of memory and imagination, with the doses varying each time. 'Flower Children,' I see now, was a story I'd been trying to write since I'd begun writing. It is, in a sense, a condensation of nearly all the stories, pages, and even poems that I wrote in grade school, high school, and then college.
The public source identifies “Maxine Swann” as american writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Maxine, Swann and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6795997. VIAF identifies the subject as 53523809. The Library of Congress control number is n2003044497. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1994, 1997 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maxine Swann” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.