Margaret Britton Vaughn

Margaret Britton Vaughn (July 16, 1938 – June 27, 2026) was an American poet laureate.

She was baptized Methodist the Methodist church and raised in the Church of Christ. She attended the Episcopal Church. Her belief in hypocrisy and unnecessary rules of the church inspired her book You're Laughing, Ain’t Ya, God?

Vaughn lived in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and was frequently visited by people seeking mentorship, advice and conversations about poetry. Celebrity visitors include Bill Moyers and Maya Angelou. Vaughn overcame both kidney and breast cancer.

Career Vaughn attended Perkinston Junior College and transferred to Mississippi Southern College, but she ultimately left this school without a degree in her senior year.

Vaughn has expressed that the talents of poetry are inherited and their pursuit inevitable. She herself gave up her career of seventeen years in advertising to pursue writing full time, to her family and friends’ dismay. She began this transition by working in a newspaper to build her skills then fully committing to poetry. She is the only recipient of the Mark Twain fellowship from Elmira College. Her time in a place Mark Twain once lived in inspired her work, Foretasting Heaven: Conversations with Twain at Quarry Farm.

She described her writing as communicating the experience of living in small towns. From a young age, she was inspired by and heavily influenced by country music and wrote poems and songs. She has also written plays performed at the numerous Tennessee theaters; her most famous play, I Wonder if Eleanor Roosevelt Ever Made a Quilt, was performed at the National Quilter's Convention.

In 1995, the Tennessee state legislature selected Vaughn to be Tennessee's poet laureate citing many of the plays, collections, and books Vaughn wrote throughout her career and her performances and outreach throughout the state of Tennessee. As poet laureate, Vaughn wrote Tennessee's bicentennial poem, inaugural poems for many Tennessee governors including current governor, Bill Lee, and a poem to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the US Air Force.