Mermaid Theory

Maya Salameh is the author of How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Salameh has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. She has served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and a Community Organizer for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Mizna, Poetry, Gulf Coast, and The Rumpus, among others. She is based in Los Angeles, California.

“I will read anything Maya Salameh writes. This collection is a delight of dream-logic, old and new mythologies, intimacies, hallucinatory sciences.”—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die: Poems“Every sentence in these poems is an opportunity to see something differently, to astonish.”—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World“From Syria to the house party, there is no landscape that Maya Salameh cannot paint with rigorous spirit, delectable lyric, and a fierce poetics all her own.”—Danez Smith, author of Bluff“This is a poet who’s not waiting around for the imperialist death machine to declare who counts as a person or what counts as art. This is a poet who sings from the river to the sea.”—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency“A precise and intimate book about what it means to grow up in a world that is neither kind nor forgiving.”—Noor Hindi, co-editor of Heaven Looks like Us“Luscious and lilting, softly chaotic and fierce.”—Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability“Irreverent and experimental. This is cinema in verse.”—Fady Joudah, author of Ellipsis