Born in New York in 1950, Maurya Simon is the author of The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2016 (Red Hen Pres, 2018), Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004), Weavers (2000), The Golden Labyrinth (1995), Speaking in Tongues (1991), Days of Awe (1990), and The Enchanted Room (1986). She is the recipient of a 1999 NEA fellowship in poetry, and she has been awarded 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. Simon has been a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as a Fellow at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Calyx, New England Review, and in more than fifty additional literary magazines and journals. Her poetry has also been collected in more than a dozen anthologies. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside and lives in Mt. Baldy, in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains, in southern California.