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.