A photograph of Max McDonough outside, wearing a backwards baseball cap.

Max McDonough's debut poetry collection, Python with a Dog Inside It (Black Lawrence Press, 2025), won the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. His poetry has been published in AGNI, Ecotone, Northwest Review, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His prose has been nominated for a James Beard Award and has appeared in The New York Times, Food52, On the Seawall, among other outlets. He earned an MFA from Vanderbilt University and a BA from the University of Virginia. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.