Maura
McDermott
Maura McDermott is Communications Director at the
Kerr Center. She writes for and edits the center's newsletter
Field Notes, which goes to five thousand subscribers. She
is the co-author with Kerr Center president Jim Horne, of The
Next Green Revolution, published by Haworth Press.
In addition, Maura is a nationally-recognized magazine writer,
honored for her natural history/environmental features in the
state magazine Oklahoma Today, where she is a contributing
editor. Her specialty is making agricultural and environmental
topics accessible and interesting to a broad range of readers.
Her education includes a B.A. in Journalism from the University
of Oklahoma and secondary teaching certifications in English,
American History, and Biology. She has taught high school English
and college literature and composition classes, including a stint
teaching in the prisons.
Since 1982, she and her husband Ron Wood have raised cattle and
grown vegetables on their farm in eastern Oklahoma. They built
a home (a sixteen-sided, round house) themselves, incorporating
many environmentally-friendly features. They have added wildlife
habitat and improved the soil and water quality on their farm,
which has been in Ron's family for more than fifty years. In their
spare time they enjoy doing amateur astronomy with their big homemade
telescope BART.
