Meet Maggie Moor

Maggie Moor, author, singer-songwriter, and artist

“Listening to Maggie Moor’s voice put me in a trance… I almost forgot to play my horn.” — Richie Cannata (Billy Joel)

“Moor’s poetic, stream-of-consciousness prose drops readers directly into the mind…” — Kirkus Reviews

Maggie Moor is a multi-faceted artist, a Gradiva-nominated clinician, a singer-songwriter, a national-level figure athlete, a vitality visionary in mind-body healing, and a psychological crime fiction author. Her diverse background spans clinical work in trauma and addiction at Rikers Island, teaching integration and yoga to couples mending relationships, private investigations on the streets of New York City, and more than two decades of music, performance, and creative work. These worlds converge in Charmay: New York Noir.

AN INTERCONNECTED MIRROR OF SHADOW AND LIGHT

The Lineage of Performance

Moor was raised on the Bard College campus by a professor and a drama-program lighting designer. Her great-grandparents, Charlie Brown and Mae Newman, were a celebrated vaudevillian comedy and dance team, ensuring that performance was part of her lineage long before it became her career. She studied piano, clarinet, voice, and dance from an early age, always writing her own music. Leaving conventional institutional education young, she chose a largely self-directed path of immersion, curiosity, and living with very little—a formative way of learning through mentorships and life experience that became as vital as any classroom.

Stage, Street, and Subculture

For more than two decades, Moor thrived across dance, rock, theater, and electronic music. She toured as a lead dancer for Perry Farrell of Porno for Pyros, fronted New York bands with her original songs, performed at iconic venues like The Cutting Room and The Stone Pony, and studied theatre, performing Tennessee Williams at Stella Adler. As a recording artist and singer-songwriter, she has collaborated with legends including David Sanborn, Richie Cannata, Kenny Rampton, and Mark White of the Spin Doctors. She also appeared in the Twisted Sister Christmas video series, which garnered more than 1.5 million views on YouTube and aired on VH1.

Driven to understand the hidden layers of human behavior, her path moved onto the streets of New York City as a private investigator. Working surveillance and process serving, she gained firsthand experience with deception, survival, and the city’s less visible worlds.

Clinical Inquiry

Moor later transitioned this fascination and deep perception of the human psyche into formal psychoanalysis. She graduated from the New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and received a doctoral equivalency from the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in 2018. Her high-intensity clinical work spans treating trauma and addiction with female inmates at Rikers Island, working with deeply split patients in psychiatric environments, and treating borderline splits in her private psychoanalytic practice. Her Gradiva-nominated thesis, “Coloring Between the Lines,” examined affect regulation, psychological splits, embodiment, and symbolic process.

Evolution. Body. Mind.
Alongside her clinical work, Moor has pursued the physical body as another discipline of vitality, focusing on the health effects of mind-body-heart integration. She brought this discipline into practice as a national-level figure athlete and wellness practitioner. This dedication led to her nonfiction book, I AM: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness (Archway/Simon & Schuster), rooted in the belief that emotional introspection and deep self-acceptance can free vital energy, which is then cultivated and focused through physical discipline—each informing and strengthening the other.

A Culmination: Charmay: New York Noir.
At first glance, the dark world of her psychological crime fiction series, Charmay: New York Noir, may seem far removed from her work in healing and vitality. In Moor’s work, they are not separate worlds. They are different ways of accessing the same human potential.

Music, writing, movement, psychoanalysis, investigation, and the study of the body have given Moor different ways of observing, feeling through, and analyzing how people survive, defend themselves, connect, fracture, and change. Express. Express. Express. For Moor, expression is the essence of vitality: the movement of inner cellular holding into form—light, color, words, sound. What is held within finds its way outward, freeing otherwise aging and defensive patterns and pathways, creating another way of coming into deeper, more vibrant contact with ourselves and with one another.

In SKINLESS and PSYCHOSX, that inquiry takes the form of psychological crime fiction. Moor brings readers inside the minds of characters shaped by trauma, desire, fear, addiction, intimacy, and survival, exploring the many selves we construct and the shadow aspects we may not yet know. Drawing from vast life experiences, a deep study of dramatic writing, and a raw mastery of stream-of-consciousness prose, Moor’s debut novel earned critical acclaim as “Undeniably powerful” (BookLife), “Deeply moving” (Kirkus), a “Must read” (IndieReader), and “Eloquent crime” (Foreword Reviews). Ultimately, her work is concerned with what becomes possible when visceral writing leads us to feel more deeply into another human being—and, in doing so, into ourselves.

At its core, Moor’s work is a celebration of life. It is through our ability to sit inside the depths and shadows in ourselves and humanity that we can simultaneously experience the blinding illumination of pure light, growth, and inner evolution.

Her sophomore novel, PSYCHOSX, publishing October 11. Set across a post-9/11 landscape between New York and London, the psychological noir follows a woman surviving the aftermath of addiction who transforms herself into a private investigator, performer, and spy. As she is drawn into the orbit of a mercurial filmmaker, her real life is weaponized against her in a brutal, real-time performance. Driven by a raw, post-punk, confessional charge, the novel explores the paranoia of surveillance, how we shift for the camera, and what happens when the ghosts we hunt are ultimately inside ourselves.

Moor spends most of her time in New York City, where she continues to train, record, facilitate wellness, and write her third novel. You can connect with her and follow her writing journey on social media at @MaggieMoor.

Artist's Statement

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Professional Inquiries:

Maggie is available for live readings, interviews, and queries. Visit: Upcoming Event | Press | Media Package

Manuscripts and film/TV scripts available upon request. Contact: MaggieMoorWriter@gmail.com