Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in JMWW, The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals, and she has work forthcoming in Alta and Maintenant. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and is the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Score and Bone (Black Lawrence Press/Nomadic Press, 2016) and Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects, 2013). Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community.
Photograph by Annabelle Port