Previous Works:

A collection of sharp, accessible 5-line poems depicting moments in a life, from corporate offices to domestic life to international travel.

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Bio

Laura Maffei was born in Brooklyn and brought up on Staten Island. She has lived in upstate New York, London, Texas, and Long Island, and has visited Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Estonia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, The Netherlands, and Poland, and hopes to see a lot more of the world.

While finishing her MFA program in fiction, she came across the Japanese "tanka" poetry form and promptly focused solely on writing an English-language version of tanka for the next ten years. Her book Drops from Her Umbrella (Inkling Press 2006) is a collection of 131 of the best of the several thousand 5-line poems that she wrote during that period.

She also founded the poetry journal American Tanka and served as its editor for twelve years, producing 17 issues.

When she was 12 years old, Laura Maffei was diagnosed with Fascioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy, though her symptoms were still mostly invisible at the time. Her current project is a memoir called Girl with a Secret: How I Tried to Hide Muscular Dystrophy with Tight Jeans and Makeup. It will tell how she spent adolescence and young adulthood trying to follow her family's request that she keep her diagnosis a secret, even as it became more and more visible.

Laura has an MFA in creative writing from the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin and an MA in screenwriting from The University of Texas at Austin's Radio-TV-Film department. Her BA in creative writing is from SUNY-Binghamton. She received an NEH fellowship to study women writers and has been a writer-in-residence at the Julia and David White Artists' Colony in Costa Rica.

She has worked as a technical writer, a corporate communications specialist, an adjunct professor, and a creative writing instructor for gifted children. She currently teaches writing and literature at an independent school.