Dawn, Maggi Eleanor

Author & Composer

b 1959. Her most popular single work featured in MP, Spring Harvest collections and other books of the 1980s-90s. Backed by music from husband Andy Cross she has recorded ‘Something in the atmosphere’ and other songs. After some years as a singer, songwriter and musician she studied at Fitzwilliam Coll (MA 1996) and Ridley Hall Cambridge, where she trained for ministry; ordained (CofE) 1999. Following a curacy at Ely which included occasional music leadership she became Chaplain of King’s Coll Cambridge in 2001, and from 2003 Chaplain of Robinson Coll in that city. She has appeared regularly at the ‘Greenbelt’ Christian arts festival, on BBC Radio 4, and as a contributor to writing about liturgy. Her PhD was on aspects of S T Coleridge’s writing; identifying with a post-evangelical commitment to the ‘emerging church’, in 1997 she wrote You have to change to stay the same. She has recently observed that (for various reasons) ‘ordinary worshippers still find themselves disempowered in church’; and in 2004 (warning against a constant and finance-driven thirst for novelty) that ‘praying through the same texts over decades, through love and celebration, through bereavement and unemployment, through lean and rich times, unlocks a deeper level of engagement with those texts’. A more traditional song from 1994 is Into the darkness of this world, which is often used in Advent or Christmas and appears in Carol Praise (2006). and Sing Praise (2010). No.422