Maia Evrona is an internationally recognized 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 at the age of twenty, without a bachelor’s degree, after having been too ill to attend high school and college. Since then, over a hundred of her poems, essays, memoir, and translations have appeared in literary journals and other 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 the legendary poet 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. Some of her translations have been set to music.

She was recently awarded an In Geveb/Fortunoff Archive fellowship to write poetry, in English and Yiddish, inspired by the Yiddish-language Holocaust testimonies in Yale University’s Fortunoff Archive. She has also been a UNESCO City of Literature poet-in-residence in Sweden, where Yiddish is an official minority language.

She also dances Argentine tango.