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Maria Dahvana Headley

March 2, 2021

Maria Dahvana Headley Craft Talk recorded on March 2, 2021

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author of eight books, including Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which has recently been named by Kirkus, NPR, and The New Statesman as a Book of the Year, and The Mere Wife (MCD x FSG, 2018), named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction. In addition to her books for adults, she’s written two YA novels (Magonia and Aerie, HarperCollins, 2015 and 2016), and an internationally bestselling memoir about dating, The Year of Yes. Headley’s genre-bending short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and Tiptree Awards, as well as for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been anthologized in many year’s bests including Best American Fantasy & Science Fiction, Best American Experimental Writing, and Best American Erotica. A collection will be published in 2021 by FSG. Her essays on gender, chronic illness, politics, propaganda, and mythology have been published and covered in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, and the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab, among other organizations. She’s taught writing in the master’s program at Sarah Lawrence, and has delivered or will soon deliver masterclasses and lectures at Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Northwestern, UCSD, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. She grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.