Maurya Simon’s eleventh volume of poems, La Sirena: A Novella in Verse, has recently been published by Cloudbank Books. Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2016 (Red Hen Press, 2018), was awarded the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Simon’s other awards include a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (Bangalore, South India), an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She currently serves as Professor Emerita and Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside, and lives in the Angeles National Forest in Southern California.
Nonfiction
Spring 2024
A Tribute to Poet Robert Mezey
Early in the evening of Saturday, April 25, 2020, I finished editing a long interview with renowned American poet and Pomona College professor Robert Mezey. It comprised eight hours of […]
Poetry
Summer 2007
Black Widow
This dangler who visits me disguised as agile beauty is death's sweet marionette, an eight-legged, swollen speck— a tiny, black forget-me-not spinning her soundless tune with a luminescent thread. Her […]
Poetry
Spring 2003
The Spiral Pilgrimage
Rome, October 382 B.C. I mill around. I spill my thoughts. I spool them up again. I dream of wheelbarrows bearing pyramids of entrails. I set fires: to the […]
Poetry
Autumn 1990
Los Angeles, Fin de siècle
Delirium in the downtown mall today: Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say, "I saw you in this, I saw you in that: you were […]
Poetry
Autumn 1990
Random Silences
Tragically, because suddenly, in untimely guise, Someone in these mountains, monthly, dies: Just last January an errant sledder zoomed Into a cedar's trunk, leaving as sole heirloom Her peppered blood […]