Maureen McCoy lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a professor and member of the Program in Creative Writing at Cornell University; and in Taos, New Mexico, where she climbs mountains. She is the author of four novels, most recently Junebug (Leapfrog Press, 2004). Walking After Midnight, Summertime, and Divining Blood were published by Poseidon/Simon & Schuster; paperback editions of Walking After Midnight and Summertime were published by Washington Square Press. The novels take place in Iowa, on the Mississippi River, Nebraska and other stops around the Midwest. She is also the author of short fiction, monologues for actors, including "My Bonny Elvis" which was performed in Germany and Tennessee, and anthologized excerpts. "How Tiny Tim Entered The Witness Protection Program," set in Des Moines, was published in Epoch Magazine. In editor Nancy Pearl's Book Lust (Sasquatch Books, 2003) Walking After Midnight tops the list for Elvis-friendly novels. "A personal essay, "Vickie's Pour House: A Soldier's Peace," published in the Antioch Review, was a finalist for a 2009 National Magazine Award. The essay reappears in the Antioch Review's Fall 2011 issue that features the best writing published in the last ten years.

Maureen McCoy has taught fiction workshops at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Cornell; in after-school programs around eastern Iowa; and summer programs at the UNM Taos Summer Writers Conference, the Vermont MFA Program, and Kalamazoo College. Writing residencies include two years at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; The MacDowell Colony, NH; The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos; and Hawthornden International Center for Writers in Edinburgh. She holds a B.A. from the University of Denver and an M.F.A. degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Maureen McCoy was honored with a two-year position as Albert Schweitzer Fellow in the Humanities at the State University of New York, by then-Schweitzer Chair Toni Morrison. At Cornell she was the first recipient of the Helen and Robert Appel Fellowship in the Humanities, which allowed for research abroad. She received a James Michener Award from the Copernicus Society for work on her first novel.

Through her Real McCoy Writing Help service, Maureen offers close reading of and manuscript consultation and editorial work on fiction and non-fiction manuscripts. She works with writers at all levels of experience and various goals, charging an hourly or flat fee depending on the nature and extent of work requested.

Related work includes editorial assistant to the Iowa State Historical Society's magazine Palimpsest, instigator of and major field research on the Society's "Italian Americans of Des Moines" study, and a stint working in a fortress-like building perched on the edge of Iowa City where she held the vaguely suspect-sounding title of "hand scorer" for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Unrelated work includes being part of the McCoy family dynasty that began Veggie Table at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, a plucky food booth which, among other goodies and surrounded by pork, bravely puts forth the famous veggie corn dog.