Maurya Simon taught creative writing at the University of California, Riverside for twenty-six years, and she currently serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita at UC Riverside. She is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming The Wilderness, New & Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018). Additional books include: Speaking in Tongues, a nominee for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Ghost Orchid, which was nominated in 2004 for a National Book Award in Poetry, Cartographies, (Red Hen Press, 2008), a recent letterpress book, Questions My Daughters Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Them (Blackbird Press, 2014), and a novel in verse entitled The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St. Jerome & St. Paula (Elixir Press, 2010). Simon has been the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as 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 1991 Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship, which allowed her a six month-long writing sojourn in Bangalore, South India. She has held fellowships and residencies at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Santa Cruz, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators in Visby, Sweden, at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and twice at the American Academy in Rome. In addition, she served as a U.C. faculty lecturer at Lund University in southern Sweden.