I have had a long love affair with history, and the stories we tell about the past. It didn’t hurt that my father, a history professor, regaled my sister and me with rascally bits about his brothers and their grandmother-protectors, years before in Pittsburgh. Like him, I consider myself a born teacher, and with K-12 students have enjoyed rekindling the magic of childhood creation. This started when I was raising my daughter in the 1970s: it was oddly exhilarating to read Wallace Stevens while she napped and Betsy, Tacy, and Tib when she awoke. My current writing project is a mother-daughter travel memoir which has taken me fifteen years to complete, though I’ve published lots of other things in between.

Almost everything I write—whether it’s for young or older readers, poetry, creative prose, readers theater scripts, reviews or teacherly essays--contains some fascination with making meaning from memory and the visual world as portrayed in our images. Though I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina where my father began teaching when I was four, we spent many childhood summers in my North Dakota mother’s hometown. One of my favorite poem sequences was inspired by anonymous family photographs which evoke her Swedish-German, midwestern origins. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been listening at family keyholes all my life.

Two of my books and a number of essays related to my experience as a writer-in-the-schools—almost all focus on memory, history, and our varied cultures. I’ve also conducted many oral history projects with Minnesota communities: labor history in Red Wing; feminism and art in Minneapolis’ WARM gallery; potato farming in Isanti, and Swedish settlement in Scandia. Often paired with writers-in-the-schools residencies, these projects result in readers theater scripts which include students’ writing. When community members perform these scripts, it brings their story full circle with dazzling success.

My Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota has served me well. Now I teach students in Hamline University’s School of Graduate Liberal Studies and School of Graduate Education, Metro State University, and the University of Minnesota’s Masters in Liberal Studies Program. Along the way, my work has garnered awards and grants from The Loft and the Jerome Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Center for Arts Criticism, The Minnesota Historical Society and the Minnesota Humanities Commission. I’ve been blessed with many art colony stays at Ragdale, Norcroft, The Dorset Colony, and the Anderson Center. I give readings of my poetry and prose, address professional and creative groups, lead workshops, and as a member of the Laurel Poetry Collective, advocate for community-based poetry and publishing.

Think of me at the top of a century-old St. Paul house, surrounded by three furry muses, Julia, Tilly and Maggie, collaborating with husband Fran Galt, who has inspired two of my books for young readers, and keeps me supplied with baseball stories and literary tips. Think of me also tending the many trees I’ve planted, a commitment to a sustainable and very green future which I hope includes all kinds of US.

The Circuit Writer:
Writing with Schools and Communities
Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2006
ISBN 978-0-915924-26-4

This compelling account of working with far-flung and near-by schools describes a lesson I continually relearn: how essential it is to fit writing and reading education to our diverse cultures and communities. Evoking the great tradition of pioneering educators, the book grapples with our enduring tension between encouraging assimilation and respecting native traditions and wisdom. Special focus on Somali, Hispanic, and Native American communities.

Between the Houses: A Collection of Poetry
The Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004
ISBN 978-0-9728934-9-7

“Galt’s first full-length book of wonderfully textured and captivating poems...tells engrossing tales of home where “high heels sink in mud,” and amazing tales of her practical mother and racist father, illustrating “how the old architecture of desire takes hold” and even “the broken heart knows its spill of joy.”

--Carol Connolly, St. Paul’s poet laureate, review in the Star Tribune, January 30, 2005.

Stop this War:
American Protest of the Vietnam Conflict
Lerner Publishing, 2000
Ages 10 and up, ISBN 978-0-8225-1740-5

Framed by my husband’s experience as a pacifist imprisoned during the Vietnam war, this book chronicles the tumultuous decades of protest which began with a few radical young people and hippies and eventually disrupted presidential politics, changed the face of college campuses (with the disaster at Kent State) and eventually grew to a nation-wide movement of marches, teach-ins, sabatoge and draft-dodging.

Awards
Finalist for Kids Pick of the List, Spring 2000

Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art
by George Morrison as told to Margot Fortunato Galt
Minnesota Historical Society, 1998
Ages 10 and up, ISBN 978-0-87351-360-9

Minnesota Ojibway artist George Morrison is one of our cultural and artistic treasures. In this oral history memoir, George and I gathered his words and I then shaped a narrative telling about his childhood on Lake Superior, his family traditions, relation to the white community of Grand Marais, and the development and fruition of his art. Taking its title from one of the Objiway names George received at a healing ceremony, the book captures his wry humor and stunning surreal insights. His excitement at coming to New York and becoming friends with the “big boys” of Abstract Expressionism; then at mid-life returning to Minnesota where he taught himself about Native American art and began the signature totems and wood collages for which he has become famous. With many photographs of his life and art, this is both a story and an art book, a cultural exploration and a feast for the eyes, showing how a talented artist blended European and Native traditions to forge a unique vision of a horizon he approached with awe and innovation.

Awards
Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, 1998; George Morrison was honored at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian with one of two solo exhibits, November 2004

The Country’s Way with Rain
The Kutenai Press, 1995

Limited edition, fine-art, handmade book with tipped-in photographs accompanying each poem. Contact the author for copies: mgalt@juno.com.

This small handsome book contains a series of poems inspired by anonymous family photographs which I bought in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota flea market. The poems blend details of personal and public history in surreal, imaginative ways that use the look of each photo as part of the story.

“Most verse written from photographs runs toward the sentimental and doesn’t push past description, but Galt quickly sets description aside, using the photo merely as a foothold from which to step off into...well-grounded, unsentimental fancy...energetic thrusting out into the imaginative distinguishes each of Galt’s poems.”

--Ted Kooser, The Georgia Review, Summer 1996

Up to the Plate:
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
Lerner Publishing, 2004
Ages 9 and up, ISBN 978-0-8225-3326-9

Fans took to The All-American Girls when men’s sports slowed during World War II. The skirts were short but the vim and skill were professional. This book captures the women’s excitement at going professional, the limitations placed on them by society’s attitudes, and the players’ spunk and high energy in challenging stereotypes and bringing the game into line with standard baseball by the League’s end. Based on extensive oral history with players, and informed with “real baseball” statistics and play-by-play analysis of crucial games, this is the only book written about the League that treats their strategy and skill, and the games’ unfolding excitement like the real sport it was.

Awards
Finalist for a Minnesota Book Award; finalist for the Midland Authors Award in the category of Children’s Nonfiction; Award Book for the Society of School Librarians; Nominated for excellence by Children’s Round Table of Chicago, 1996; American Libraries Youth’s Services select book for campaign to get kids to “Read Every Change You Get.” June/July 1997

The Story in History:
Writing Your Way into the American Experience
Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1992
ISBN 978-0-915924-39-4

By now this book has become something of a classic, opening the door for imagination to enter writing about history. Geared to K-12 classroom use, yet appropriate for serious adult writers as well, The Story in History flings a wide net to capture tantalizing approaches--from Dakota “Winter Counts” to letters or diaries imaginatively created for public figures like George Washington or Frederick Douglass, from odes to crucial foodstuffs to writing about our individual early maps of the world.

Essays on Teaching K-12 in anthologies
from Teachers & Writers Collaborative:

The Alphabet of Trees, 2000
Classics in the Classroom, 1999
Sing the Sun Up:African American Literature, 1998
The T&W Guide to Frederick Douglass, 1996
Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments, 1995
Educating the Imagination, 1994
The T&W Guide to Walt Whitman, 1991

Poems in the following antholgies:

To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press, 2006)

Yearly anthologies published by the Laurel Poetry Collective, 2002-2006

Looking for Home (Milkweed Editions, 1990)

Woman Poet: The Midwest, 1985.

The Poet Dreaming in the Artist’s House (Milkweed Editions, 1984)

Border Crossings (New Rivers Press, 1984)

The Selby-Lake Bus (Lake Street Review, 1979)

Creative Prose in the following anthologies:

Going to the Lake (Loonfeather Press, 1996)

The House on Via Gombito: North American Women Traveling Abroad (New Rivers Press, 1990)

Editor for two COMPAS anthologies of student writing:

Give Me Your Hand (2000)

When It Grows Up, You Say Goodbye to It (1981)