Maurya Simon

Maurya Simon is the author of The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe (Copper Canyon Press, 1986, 1989), Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Golden Labyrinth (University of Missouri Press, 1995). A fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was published in a limited edition by the fine letter-press book publisher, Sutton Hoo Press, in 2002. Simon’s sixth volume, Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004) was nominated for a 2004 National Book Award in Poetry. A limited edition, letter-press collection of ekphrastic poems, WEAVERS, based on the paintings of Los Angeles artist Baila Goldenthal, was published by Blackbird Press in October 2005, and Simon’s eighth volume of poems, The Mapmaker’s Art, was published in 2007. “Tamar,” an opera based on Simon’s eponymous verse libretto, premiered at the University of Rhode Island in the Spring of 2007. Her most recent collection of poems is a novel in verse entitled The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome and St. Paula, published in 2010 by Elixir Press.

Simon has been the recipient of two Visiting Artist Fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, an NEA Fellowship in poetry, a University Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship to conduct research in Bangalore, South India. Simon has been a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, as well as a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New England Review, and in more than fifty anthologies. Simon’s poetry has been translated into French, Rumanian, Bengali, Spanish, and Farsi.

Maurya Simon is a Professor Emerita in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in Southern California.