My work often blurs genres, working across modes and styles that might be classified as lyric, narrative, hybrid, memoir, flash, linked, speculative, and experimental.
SELECTED NONFICTION
I am currently shopping a memoir, “Raised by Ferns,” which was runner up in the 2022 Sue Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction from AWP. Excerpts can be read here:
Diagram: “Poverty Fires”
The Rumpus: “Complete the Sentence”
Humanities Washington blog: “The Privilege Button”
Passages North: “Lower Columbia Watershed Haibun”
Bellingham Review, Issue 71, November 2015: “He Worked As an Electrician. He Enjoyed Television. (His Obituary Was Plain.)”,
Brevity Magazine, January 2017: “American Professionals”
Guesthouse Lit: “Sestina for Foragers”
High Desert Journal, Fall 2015: “Questions for the Immigrant’s Daughter,” and “After the Birth of My Daughter, I Try to Imagine My Father as a Child,”
“On Libraries and Vans,” blog post in Erin Pringle-Toungate’s Summer Library Series, 2015
On the Seawall: “It Was the Sound of a Cloud Looking at Itself” and “Thanks so Much for the Urn,” February 2021
Other nonfiction can be found in Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, Seneca Review, The Normal School, Florida Review, The Pinch, Spark Magazine (the Magazine of Humanities Washington), and the New York Times-reviewed anthology, This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, as well as elsewhere.
SELECTED FICTION
I am currently shopping a novella-in-vignettes, titled “A Few Nondescript Adventures of Some Consequence.” A few examples from this work can be found here:
Another Chicago Magazine: “Antecedarian”
Bellingham Review: “The In-Between”
Booth Journal: “A Few Nondescript Adventures of Some Consequence”
Necessary Fiction: “Sixteen Bios . . . “
Queen Mob’s Tea House: “The Surgery”
Sundog Lit: “Office Man and The Conference”
Menacing Hedge: “Field Trip”
Moss Journal: “Office Girl & University Hero, Chapter One: Change”
Portland Review: “What We Want From Our Superfoods”
More pieces appear in Santa Monica Review, Rock & Sling, & Lilac City Fairy Tales (Towers & Dungeons Anthology), and other places.
SELECTED POETRY
I am currently shopping two manuscripts, “out takes/glove box,” which has been a finalist with the National Poetry Series, the Jake Adam York, the New American Poetry Prize, and elsewhere; and “Tori Amos Nursing the Pig,” which has been a finalist with the Possession Sound Reading Series (Poetry Northwest) and Anhinga’s Robert Dana Prize.
Recently online:
“From the Dictionary of Reclaimed Nouns–Thrashing: (gerund), What Tulips Do” in Cortland Review
“From the Dictionary of Reclaimed Nouns—Doula: (n), A Professional, Trained in Elegy” & “Barn (n): a thing in a jar” in Menacing Hedge
“How You Put Me On My Back in the Thistles: A(field) Ekphrasonnet” & “The Brain — is Wider Than the Sky —” in Guesthouse Lit
“On 5 April 1884” in One Hand Clapping
“spell for their belly buttons/ with a dictionary clogging its windpipe” and “Benediction Remembering Sunrise and Fawn, with a Trip to the Planetarium” in Blackbird
“The Pleasure of Ruin” in Willow Springs
“Laozi” in Poetry Northwest
“little spell for kestrel hovering/ for x-ray & mothering” in Underblong
“Dear America” in The Rumpus
“Letter to Tori in December” in Glass Poetry
What Rough Beast.: “Spell for Conjuring Order: Pleuronectiformes,” in What Rough Beast
“Tori Amos Nursing the Pig,” in The Shallow Ends
“Spell for Electron Microscopes/ for Silicate Minerals & Landfills” in Hobart Pulp
“Will You Tape a Big Zero to My Shirt?“, in Sidereal
“A Small Replica of History,” in Matter Monthly
“It Turns Out a Broken Heart” in Rise Up Review
RADAR POETRY SUITE: “This Aurora Has a Crack and is Beginning to Take on Water”
“There Are Two Kinds of People in this World”
“For Danelle, on the Curving Back Roads of Wahkiakum County, at the Unblemished Age of Sixteen” (Thanks to Radar for nominating this poem for a Pushcart Prize)
OTHER POEMS:
All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood: “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit”
Bellingham Review: “A New Kind of Romance” and “I Set My Alarm for 2:52, But They Had the Time Wrong for Us Out Here in the West”
The Compass: “In Art Therapy, They Have Us Sketch Legs”
Dogwood: “Playing Scrabble with Steve and Crystal”
Ecotone: “Socioeconomic”
Florida Review: “Astoria”
High Desert Journal: “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Numbers One Through Six,” “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Numbers Seven Through Nine,” and “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Number Ten”
INK Node:“Craigslist” (first appeared in New Ohio Review) and “When They Scanned My Brain for Love” (first appeared in Lilac City Fairy Tales)
The James Franco Review:“Biological Half-Lives”
Glass: A Journal of Poetry: “Spell Begging to Be Your Gerry Lindgren/ Spell Lying Down on the Job”
Juked: “Still Life with Maternal Instincts”
Kahini: “How She Comes to Understand Her Baptism”
Lost Horse Press (from RUST FISH): “The Rust Fish”
Montana Public Radio: “Goddammit” (first appeared in Rust Fish)
New Ohio Review: “Facing” and “The Woman Who Didn’t Know How” (audio file)
Pank: “Before the River Freezes,” “Hot Streak, Mid-May,” and “Falling”
Prism Review: “Nymphomaniac Dreams of Hell”
Pontoon Poetry: “In those Early Days, the Woman Who Was a Mermaid Dreams of Loneliness”
Rattle: “Why We Can’t Use Roundup On Our Lawn”
Raven Chronicles: “Migration”
Southern Humanities Review: “What She Sees Above Us”
Spoon River Poetry Review: “The Filling”
Squalorly: “Under the Cathedral Tree” and “Trains”
Tahoma Literary Review: “The Oriole Outside My Window Reminds Me” (audio file)
The Far Field (blog of WA State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken): “Honesty” (this poem first appeared in Rattle)
Waywiser Press: “A Mother’s Story” and “Marsupial”
West Branch: “Something Like Singing in the Rain”
. . and elsewhere . . .
See BOOKS for more.
Maya Jewell-Zeller 