Maya Stein is a Ninja poet, writing guide, and creative adventuress. At nearly 9 years old, she earned perfect scores on her spelling test 6 weeks in a row, an accomplishment noted by her teacher at Wenonah Elementary in Waynesboro, Virginia. She had also discovered—for reasons unknown to her still—an aptitude for math that landed her in a class in the grade above with her sister Mikhal (who wasn’t especially pleased about it). That year, Maya also wrote her first poem, called “Papa Tree and the Seasons,” which she illustrated and bound into a book. Other highlights from that year include watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and being totally freaked out the next morning by a small gathering of crows on a nearby light pole, an obsession with Saturday morning cartoons and the discovery of two other TV shows—Charlie’s Angels and The Incredible Hulk—that figured significantly into her playdates—and the arrival of her baby brother, Adam, to whom she begrudgingly sanctioned the occupancy of an upstairs bedroom across the hall from hers.
Forty-two years later, Maya is living in Northport, Maine in a house named Toad Hall with her artist wife, Amy Tingle, who serves as Program Director at Waterfall Arts. How can one summarize Maya's past 4 decades in a single paragraph? Impossible. But perhaps it is enough to say that she can still solve mid-level math problems if needed, that conglomerations of birds still make her slightly uneasy, that the feeling of flexing her biceps can still make her feel like she could lift a car of off train tracks if she had to, that she loves her siblings fiercely, and that poetry persists in claiming a great deal of her attention. She has kept a weekly short-form poetry practice, “10-line Tuesday,” since 2005, has written a handful of poetry collections, and a series of writing prompt books (“Writing Prompts for Ordinary People”), and recently received a 2023 IPPY Independent Spirit Award winner for her coffee-table book “The Poser: 38 Portraits Reimagined,” a collection of contemporary art re-enactments and personal essays. Maya facilitates writing classes, is a stepmom to two incredible young men, and tries to follow May Sarton’s words of wisdom: “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
She can be reached at hello@mayastein.com. Much of her writing can be found at www.mayastein.com.
