Maurya Simon

Last updated

Maurya Simon (born December 7, 1950) is an American poet, essayist, and visual artist. [1] She is the author of ten collections of poetry. Her most recent volume of poetry is The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018).

Contents

Early life and education

Born in New York City, Simon is the daughter of the Los Angeles visual artist, Baila Goldenthal, and the ethnomusicologist and composer, Robert Leopold Simon. [2] She spent her early years living in Europe with her family, and later moved to Hermosa Beach in southern California, where she lived from 1959–1968. Simon attended the University of California, Berkeley (1968–1971), where she was a student of Robert Grenier, Angela Davis, and Richard Tillinghast. She later received a B.A. from Pitzer College (1980), where she studied with Bert Meyers. At UC Irvine, Simon studied with Charles Wright and earned an M.F.A. in English Literature and Poetry in 1984.

Personal life

Simon married Robert Falk, a behavioral therapist, in 1973. They have two children. She currently serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside. Simon has lived for over thirty years in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California.

Early influences and career

As a child, surrounded by the friends of her parents who were artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, Simon was steeped in an enriching culture of the arts. She has said that growing up with a mother who was a painter and sculptor, and a father, who was a composer, musician, and music scholar, deeply influenced her writing by instilling in her an understanding that poetry is both a vocal and imagistic art. Simon's study of the violin for ten years (1955–1965) reinforced her conviction that the human body and voice contain and rhythmically express the music of language. Her mother's visual art inspired Simon to become an artist herself, and it also heightened her sense of how a poem's visual imagery creates a kind of magnetic force field for all aspects of the work.

Simon's poetry is also influenced by the two years (1970–1971 and 1990–1991) during which she lived and studied in Chennai and Bangalore, South India, and where she studied Hinduism, classical Tamil, and yoga with famed yogi, T.K.V. Desikachar. She also lectured about contemporary American poetry at Bangalore University in 1991, as well as serving in 2006 as a University of California visiting poet and faculty member at Lund University in southern Sweden.

Simon's poems have appeared in more than two hundred literary magazines and journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, Orion, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. Her work has also appeared in over two dozen poetry anthologies, including Garrison Keillor's More Good Poems (for Hard Times), W.W Norton, 2005.

Maurya Simon has published nine books of poetry. Her first two volumes were published to much acclaim by Copper Canyon Press in 1986 and 1989. Her third volume won the annual Peregrine (Gibbs) Smith Poetry Award in 1989. She has published three subsequent volumes of poetry with Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, including Ghost Orchid, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Simon received a National Endowment for the Arts award in 2000, the same year during which the University of Georgia Press published her long poetic suite, A Brief History of Punctuation, in a distinguished chapbook series. Elixir Press published her novel in verse, The Raindrop's Gospel, in 2010. Her most recent book of poetry, The Wilderness, New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2018.

List of publications

Honors and awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn D. Wright</span> American poet

Carolyn D. Wright was an American poet. She was a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hayden Carruth</span> American poet and literary critic

Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic and anthologist. He taught at Syracuse University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Stone</span> American poet (1915–2011)

Ruth Stone was an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forrest Gander</span> Poet, essayist, novelist, critic, translator

Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dana Levin</span> American poet

Dana Levin is a poet and teaches Creative Writing at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. She also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Chase Twichell is an American poet, professor, publisher, and, in 1999, the founder of Ausable Press. Her most recent poetry collection is Things as It Is. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been earned her Claremont Graduate University's prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the winner of several awards in writing from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Artists Foundation. Additionally, she has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Field, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The Yale Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Abani</span> Nigerian born American author (born 1966)

Christopher Abani is a Nigerian American and Los Angeles- based author. He says he is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in "that troubled African nation".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather McHugh</span> American poet (born 1948)

Heather McHugh is an American poet. She is notable for Dangers, To the Quick and Eyeshot. McHugh was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program and Griffin Poetry Prize.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Kasischke</span> American fiction writer and poet (born 1961)

Laura Kasischke is an American fiction writer and poet. She is best known for writing the novels Suspicious River, The Life Before Her Eyes and White Bird in a Blizzard, all of which have been adapted to film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Centolella</span> American poet and educator

Thomas Centolella is an American poet and educator. He has published four books of poetry and has had many poems published in periodicals including American Poetry Review. He has received awards for his poetry including those from the National Poetry Series, the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Dorset Prize. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brenda Shaughnessy</span> American poet (born 1970)

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at [[Rutgers University–Newark.

Shirley Kaufman Daleski was an American-Israeli poet and translator.

Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet.

Maxine Scates is an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria Chang</span> American poet and childrens writer

Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.

Jane Miller is an American poet.

Ed Skoog is an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Traci Brimhall</span> American poet

Traci Brimhall is a poet and professor in the United States. She teaches creative writing at Kansas State University.

References

  1. ↑ "Maurya Simon". Poetry Foundation. 2016-12-29. Retrieved 2016-12-29.
  2. ↑ "Maurya Simon". Poetry Foundation. 2016-12-29. Retrieved 2016-12-29.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.