Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of several books, most recently the memoir Raised by Ferns (Porphyry, March 2026); the lyric exploration of fungi, The Wonder of Mushrooms (AdventureKEEN, September 2025); and the poetry collection out takes/ glove box, chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize (November 2023). She is also co-author, with Kathryn Nuernberger, of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024), and co-editor, with Sharma Shields, of the multi-genre anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales and Verses from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Maya’s prose appears in The Rumpus, Diagram, Brevity, Bellingham Review, Booth Journal, and several anthologies, including the NY-Times bestselling This is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Environmental and Nature Writing (Bloomsbury 2025). Her essay “Scavenger Panorama” was selected by Vivian Gornick as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Fellowship from Artist Trust, and a Residencies in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and Centrum’s Port Townsend Campus at Fort Worden, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford (where she was a fellow in Spring 2024, as well as a visiting poet in Spring 2019) and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. She is Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her children.