<poet>

Maya Salameh is the author of HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022) and rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She is the youngest-ever winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and a Finalist for the California Book Award and Anzaldúa Poetry Prize.

<performer>

Maya has served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. They've performed their work at venues including the Obama White House, Carnegie Hall, and the DeYoung Museum. She has read her work for three First Ladies.

<teaching artist>

Maya's work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Rumpus, Mizna, AGNI, and the LA Times, among others. She has helped lead 4 arts courses, and facilitated 100+ poetry workshops with more than 1000 students.

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.

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"By defiling the clinical nature of the algorithm a little bit, by 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."

MAYA SALAMEH