Reading: Maria Dahvana Headley

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times-bestselling novelist, poet, translator, and dramatist, with an interest in epics, canon-expansion, and the history of both written and oral storytelling.

Headley's genre-bending work has won the Hugo and the World Fantasy Awards, as well as the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award administered by the Academy of American Poets, and been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Tiptree and Joyce Carol Oates Prizes. She's the New York Times-bestselling author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which was named a Book of the Year by The Atlantic Monthly, Kirkus, NPR, The New Statesman, and The Irish Times, among others.

In 2018, she published the novel The Mere Wife (FSG), which is a contemporary adaptation of the Beowulf poem, set in American suburbia, and dealing with questions of marginalization and monsterization in American society. She is also the author of two young adult fantastical novels, Magonia and Aerie (HarperCollins, 2015 & 2016), a fantastical reimagining of the Cleopatra story, Queen of Kings (Dutton, 2011), and the memoir The Year of Yes (Hyperion, 2006). She co-authored The End of the Sentence (Subterranean Press) with Kat Howard in 2014, and co-edited Unnatural Creatures (HarperCollins) with Neil Gaiman in 2013.