Maya Pindyck
Photo by Tyler Sargent
Bio
Maya Pindyck’s work includes writing, drawing, and public intervention. She is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, 2009), as well as the chapbook Locket, Master, selected by Paul Muldoon for a Poetry Society of America 2006 Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Tether, and elsewhere. Pindyck earned a PhD in English education from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in fine arts and philosophy from Connecticut College. She is an assistant professor of Liberal Arts and director of Writing at Moore College of Art and Design.
When I got the call, I was rushing to wake my one-year-old from her nap so that we could leave to pick up my four-year-old from preschool. It took some convincing for me to realize the call was not a prank. The shocking gift of this prestigious award affirms my commitment to the vital joy of making art and to the poems shaping my third manuscript—poems engaging personal histories to investigate whiteness, Jewishness and the spaces where they overlap. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship makes possible sustained time to write and research: a real, real privilege. It enables me to invest in childcare and maybe even a self-made residency this summer. More than a financial buoy, the award is a public act of seeing. And seeing—recognizing—helps keep the wholehearted, often solitary work of poetry going. This humbling honor moves me to consider how I can better see and support others in the work they love.
"The United States: An Introduction"
While we compare sex stories,
flaunt lines crossed—
a married man—a loading dock—
a stripper in the state that pays its strippers best—
the fireflies do their thing,
blinking neon hearts,
and peaches and chard
heat up on the grill
soon to bear the rack’s lines
across their bodies.
(Burned histories
served on white plates.)
—One last story
wobbles into the garden
to name a day kindness failed:
A simple yes
to a cruel word said about a girl
whose ear pressed the door.
This our storyteller cannot forget
This
her shoulders hold like statues
of men on horses raising the day
someone died to put them there,
aloft and galloping over
those accumulated pains
hidden in the hoof’s soft stain.
(Originally appeared in The Massacusetts Review, Volume 58, Issue 4, Winter 2017)