About
Photo by Rio Yañez
Photo by Julia Vargas
Maya is a Central American/Guatemalan poet performer, video artist, and educator. She is a founding member of the performance group “Las Manas” and has curated artistic events investigating and celebrating the intersection of politics, media and art for more than 15 years. She has collaborated with and performed as part of several poetic, performative, theater collectives over the years and has been an artist-in-residence at Galeria de la Raza and La Peña Cultural Center.
She founded and co-edited La Revista at UC Santa Cruz and has published her work in Las Girlfriends, Stanford’s Americas y Latinas, Mujeres de Maiz, Sinister Wisdom and most recently Turtle Island to Abya Yala: A Love Anthology of Art and Poetry by Native American and Latina Women.
As well as directing the documentary MADE IN BRAZIL: Dreams at Work, she directed THE LAST WORD about Las Manas, a fierce women of color artist collective, she associate produced the award winning documentary Reading Between the Rhymes, about the use of hip hop in education, and also shot and edited the video for the live theater show “Amor Cubano: In a bottle, a tube and a small packet.”
Her most recent video project “SOLIDARITY BABY” is the poetic journey of a child of the Central American solidarity movement who uses her poetry and images from memories to build bridges between her family history and present day immigrant rights struggles, made with the support of the San Francisco Film Arts STAND Award and QWOCMAP.
She is the co-editor of a collection of U.S. Central American poetry, is currently working on a book of poetic non-fiction, and teaches classes with intersections of literature, creative writing, gender, immigration, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Central American, culture and history at SFSU.
Maya is an artist for hire and is available for performances, lectures and workshops.
Email Contact: lunamaya at sfsu dot edu
Hey muxer! When is your troupes next performance? Or when and where might I catch you and some of the 74 of the anthology? I need to pick it up for sure but right now I am reading ‘Venas Abiertas de Latino America’ and others.
Hit me up.
Peace
LM3 and I are going to be performing/hosting an event June 11 at La Peña called Standard Deviations: Grown and Sexy Goes Deep. It’s going to be a great show! I should have more info about it very soon. I’m not sure about the anthology. I’m all stressed because of finals in these next two weeks but I will let you know and post it up here for sure. Abrazos. MC
Bueno pues, good luck on your finals! I’m sure you’ll rock them. Oh and are you going to Adelina Anthony’s ‘La Sad Girl’ at La Pena on May 23rd? Get at me after finals.
Cuidate, Yvonna.
Oh yes. I want to go se La Sad Girl. Maybe I’ll see you there?
Mos definitely.
How have I not seen your blog until now?? Ahh, Maya, we must never let each other sleep, for we have the awesomest almost-the same pair o’ names.
And actually, by “sleep” I mean “slip.” Irony.
Hello,
I just finished reading “Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles” (Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001) in which they cite from one of your poems. The poem (“Central Americanamerican”) intrigued me. I’d like to discuss it in a paper that I am preparing for the upcoming Northeast MLA conference. My paper will focus on voices of Guatemalan Maya women in the US: which is why, with your permission, I’d like to know a little more about your ethnic self-identification. You are described as being Guatemalan, but do you self-identify as “Ladina” or “Maya” (and if Maya, from which group), or what would you say, generally, as to your relationship with the Guatemalan Maya? Also, are you a native of Guatemala (if so, from which municipality) or were you born in the US? Sorry for the relatively personal questions, but they weren’t addressed in your website, and for the purposes of an academic paper of this nature it would be important for me to be able to address those issues.
Best wishes,
Eduardo
Harvard University 1999, BA
Universidad San Pablo-CEU (Madrid) 2oo4, PhD
Cornell Law Class of 2011