MAYA SALAMEH

<poet>

Maya Salameh is the author of HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and finalist for the California Book Award, as well as the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, The Offing, AGNI, and ANMLY, among others.

<performer>

Maya has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, the DeYoung Museum, and her mother's kitchen. She is a 2025 NEA Fellow, 2025 Tin House Scholar, 2024 Sewanee Writers' Conference Fellow and 2023 Winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Exceptional New Writers.

<teaching artist>

Maya has taught writing and poetry for over a decade, facilitating more than 70 workshops reaching hundreds of students. She has taught across multiple creative roles, most recently with Brooklyn Poets, Ellipsis Writing, and Workshops for Gaza.
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Latest release

How To Make An Algorithm in the Microwave

Layering code with hymns, punnett squares, and spells, Salameh brings the digital lexicon into riotous conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood.

Here, Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her, and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.
The University of Arkansas Press
Bookshop
Amazon

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"By defiling the clinical nature of the algorithm, bringing it into the visceral, gory reality of our bodies, we render it also a body that we can challenge and question."

"How do we stare back at appliances of the surveillance state? How do we begin to say, the computer is not infallible, the algorithm is riddled with bugs we can pick at and opinions that can be rewritten. One important space of freedom for me was interacting with technological forms in more rambunctious ways, imposing play on the algorithm."

"Part of what makes the book’s programing framework so effective is Salameh's experimentation with verbs, which calls our attention to the way words operate on our minds as bits of code that we, in turn, process."