Maurya Simon

Maurya Simon was born in New York City and grew up in Europe and Southern California. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Pitzer College, and the University of California, Irvine. In the 1970s and 1990s, Simon lived in South India, where she studied Tamil and pranayama yoga. She’s won numerous awards, including the 2019 IPBA Franklin Awards Gold Medal for her tenth volume of poems, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2016 (2018).  Additional honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Mary Carolyn Davies and Celia B. Wagner Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and the Visby Centre in Sweden. Simon’s poetry is widely anthologized, and she has given poetry readings across the nation and around the world. She presently serves as a professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Simon divides her time between Mt. Baldy and San Clemente, California.