Maria S. Picone

Maria S. Picone—수영—(she/her/hers) writes, paints, and teaches from her home in South Carolina. As a queer Korean adoptee, Maria often explores themes of identity, exile, social justice, and belonging. Her debut poetry chapbook, Adoptee Song, will be published in early 2023. 

Maria’s publications include flash fiction, flash and full-length CNF, poetry, translations, visual art, and hybrid work. Her writing has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Porter House Review, The Seventh Wave, and Fractured Lit, among others. She is the winner of the Cream City Review Summer 2020 Poetry Prize and was published in Best Small Fictions 2021. She is also a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and three-time Best of the Net nominee. 

Her work has been supported by scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, The Speakeasy Project, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, GrubStreet, AWP, Voices of Our Nations Arts, Murphy Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, The HUES Foundation, The Watering Hole, South Carolina Writers Association, Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Juniper Institute and The Loft. She has attended residencies at Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto, Starry Night Retreat in New Mexico, and House of Two Urns Retreat in Chicago. A residency is forthcoming at The Hambidge Center in Georgia, for which she won a Distinguished Fellowship for Leadership in the Arts.

She is the managing editor for Chestnut Review, poetry editor at Hanok Review, and associate editor at Uncharted Mag. She has read and/or edited for Longleaf Review, ang(st), Split/Lip Press, Emerge Literary Journal, SLICE, Headway Quarterly, and The Petigru Review. She is an associate member of SFWA and a member of several other writing organizations including SFPA, Lighthouse Writers and GrubStreet.

As an artist, Maria often paints abstract, space-inspired themes with dark, dramatic colors and gemstones. Her photography captures features of the world such as architecture, landscapes, and patterns and designs. She loves traditional brush painting and multimedia works that combine visual arts, media, and language-based arts. Her visual art can be found in the New England Review, Déraciné Magazine, and Blue Mesa Review, among others.

She received an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and holds degrees from Princeton University, Rice University, and Western New Mexico University. In 2014, she won the Spirit of Goddard Scholarship in honor of her volunteer work teaching creative writing to schoolchildren in Cambodia. She is an alumna GrubStreet’s Novel Generator program and is working on her first novel. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, and reads French, Latin, and ancient Greek. You can read her work on her website, mariaspicone.com. She also keeps an active Twitter @mspicone.