Maya Jewell Zeller (educator, essayist, poet) is the author of Raised by Ferns (spring 2026); The Wonder of Mushrooms (AdventureKEEN, fall 2025); out takes/ glove box, chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize (2023); as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017); the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015); and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is co-author, with Kathryn Nuernberger, of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Literary, 2024), and co-editor, with Sharma Shields, of the multi-genre anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales and Verses from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Zeller’s prose appears in The Rumpus, Diagram, Brevity, Bellingham Review, Booth Journal, and in several anthologies, including the NY-Times bestselling This is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Environmental and Nature Writing (Bloomsbury 2025). Additionally, her essay “Scavenger Panorama” was selected by Vivian Gornick as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Fellowship from Artist Trust, and a Residencies in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and Centrum’s Port Townsend Campus at Fort Worden, Zeller has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford (where she was a fellow in Spring 2024, as well as a visiting poet in Spring 2019) and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. She is Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA.

The Visiting Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, the Lawrence Parke Murphy and Robert Goldstein Trust, and by generous donations from the extended Whitman community.