For Maggie Lamond Simone, sarcasm was always a means of survival and words her weapon of choice. Her second-grade teacher worried about a child so flippant at such a tender age. Twenty years later, as a police officer escorted a drunken Simone away from the car she had just wrecked, she asked him to drop her not at home but at the bar where her friends waited. He didn’t laugh and she quit drinking the next day. When she finally came up for air a few years later, she was afraid that she wouldn’t be funny without the alcohol, but had a startling revelation: she wasn’t funny in the first place—the world was. So she started writing about it. This collection of her columns and essays addresses dating, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause with a caustic wit and a healthy disrespect for perfection.
MAGGIE LAMOND SIMONE is a national award-winning columnist and author. Her humor and observational essays have appeared since 2002 in Family Times, an award-winning monthly parenting magazine in Central New York, and since 2000 in The Advertiser, a weekly newspaper in East Aurora, NY. Her columns also appeared in the Sunday edition of the Syracuse Herald American (cir. 250,000) from 1995 through 2001.
Her essays are included in From Beer to Maternity (November 2009), an anthology - a 2010 USA Book News Awards finalist in three categories - as well as P.S. What I Didn't Say (2009), Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Resolution (2008), Chicken Soup for the New Mom's Soul (2007), Chicken Soup for the Soul in Menopause (2007), Misadventures of Moms and Disasters of Dads (2004), Hello, Goodbye (2004), and Cosmopolitan magazine. Ms. Simone's first children's picture book, SOPHIE'S SOUNDS (Journey Stone Creations), was released in May 2007 (ISBN #1-59958-057-8. She's won multiple national awards through Parenting Publications of America, including the 2008 and 2007 Gold Award for Humor and the 2007 Gold Award for Personal Essay.
Simone has been a monthly guest on WNTQ-Syracuse (93Q) since 2005, during which she profiles the upcoming Family Times issue, and she has also been a guest on NPR. In promoting From Beer to Maternity, she has been featured on the ABC, Fox and PBS affiliates nationwide, as well as numerous radio programs in the United States, Canada and the UK. She teaches journalism at SUNY Oswego (Oswego, New York), and is also an adjunct instructor of English at Bryant & Stratton College, Clay, New York.
She earned a Bachelor's Degree in 1983 from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, and a Master's Degree in 1992 from S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. She lives in Central New York with her husband and two children.
