Maia Evrona is a poet, prose writer and translator of Yiddish literature. She has been called a representative of a “new generation of Yiddish poet-translators.”

Originally from Massachusetts, she grew up with a serious illness. She was accepted into the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MFA program in creative writing, at the age of twenty, without a bachelor’s degree, after having been too ill to attend secondary school and college. Since then, over a hundred of her poems, essays, memoir, and translations of Yiddish poetry have appeared in a variety of venues. In 2019, she was the inaugural recipient of the joint Spain-Greece Fulbright Scholar Award, given to support her poetry. She again served as a Fulbright Scholar to Spain and Greece in 2021-22.

Her translations of the Ukraine-born poet Yosef Kerler, From a Bird’s Cage to a Thin Branch, were published by White Goat Press in 2023. Her translations of Avrom Sutzkever, meanwhile, have garnered a significant following, and have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Literary Translators Association. She has also published translations of Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin and others, as well as her own poetry in her own English to Yiddish translation.

Like many poets, she wishes she were really a singer. She manages that longing by treating her poetry readings like borderline musical performances. She has given readings of her work in New York City, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

She also dances Argentine tango.