Margaret M. Talcott joined American Ancestors in 2019, taking up the mission to educate, inspire, and connect people through inspiring events and author talks. There she created the American Inspiration author series and has since presented more than 150 authors and their works, delighting more than 145,000 readers and lifelong learners online and in person. The program is produced in Boston and broadcast to the organization’s constituents and select literary audiences nation-wide.
From 2006-2019 Ms. Talcott produced literary programs at The Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (900 seats), where she presented such cultural leaders as David McCullough, Sonia Sotomayor, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ken Burns, Tom Brokaw, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David Brooks in the celebrated series Writers on a New England Stage presented with New Hampshire Public Radio. She also produced the performance center’s Writers in the Loft and Innovation and Leadership series. Over these literary years, she has interviewed on stage Lee Child, Gail Collins, Amor Towles, Anna Quindlen, Daniel Pink, Scott Simon, and Celeste Ng, among others.
Ms. Talcott worked previously in New York as a Director and Vice President of corporate marketing at Merrill Lynch in New York, in network news, and in book publishing, most notably as an editor at William Morrow and at Atheneum Publishers under the leadership of Alfred Knopf, Jr. She graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Religion and did post-graduate work in English literature at The Bread Loaf of School of English (Middlebury College). She was a scholar the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, awarded for poetry.
She has served on boards and committees for many New York and New England nonprofits including The Trustees, Trinity Church in the City of Boston, the Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH), and Berwick Academy in South Berwick, ME. In other volunteer leadership roles, she has managed programming for numerous private organizations and currently serves on the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee for the Town of Brookline, MA.
