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, AGNI, ANMLY, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and the LA Times, among others.

<performer>

Maya has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, the DeYoung Museum, and her mother's kitchen. She has received support in the form of fellowships and grants from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Institute for Diversity in Arts, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the William Male Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, and the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities.

<teaching artist>

Maya has taught writing and arts practice since high school, facilitating over 70 workshops reaching hundreds of students. She has taught across multiple creative roles, first as a National Student Poet (2016-2017), poetry instructor with Izcali (2017), the Markaz Center’s Inaugural Artist-in-Residence (2018-2019), and community organizer for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (2019-2022). 
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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.
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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."