As a child, surrounded by the friends of her parents who were artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, Simon was steeped in an enriching culture of the arts. She has said that growing up with a mother who was a painter and sculptor, and a father, who was a composer, musician, and music scholar, deeply influenced her writing by instilling in her an understanding that poetry is both a vocal and imagistic art. Simon's study of the violin for ten years (1955–1965) reinforced her conviction that the human body and voice contain and rhythmically express the music of language. Her mother's visual art inspired Simon to become an artist herself, and it also heightened her sense of how a poem's visual imagery creates a kind of magnetic force field for all aspects of the work. Simon's poetry is also influenced by the two years (1970–1971 and 1990–1991) during which she lived and studied in Chennai and Bangalore, South India, and where she studied Hinduism, classical Tamil, and yoga with famed yogi, T.K.V. Desikachar. She also lectured about contemporary
American poetry at Bangalore University in 1991, as well as serving in 2006 as a University of California visiting poet and faculty member at Lund University in southern Sweden. Simon's poems have appeared in more than two hundred literary magazines and journals, including
Poetry,
The New Yorker,
The Georgia Review,
The Gettysburg Review,
The Los Angeles Times Book Review,
The Hudson Review,
Ploughshares,
The Kenyon Review,
Grand Street,
Orion,
Salmagundi,
TriQuarterly,
Prairie Schooner, and
The Southern Review. Her work has also appeared in over two dozen poetry anthologies, including
Garrison Keillor's
More Good Poems (for Hard Times), W.W Norton, 2005. Maurya Simon has published nine books of poetry. Her first two volumes were published to much acclaim by
Copper Canyon Press in 1986 and 1989. Her third volume won the annual Peregrine (Gibbs) Smith Poetry Award in 1989. She has published three subsequent volumes of poetry with Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, including
Ghost Orchid, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Simon received a
National Endowment for the Arts award in 2000, the same year during which the
University of Georgia Press published her long poetic suite,
A Brief History of Punctuation, in a distinguished chapbook series. Elixir Press published her novel in verse, ''The Raindrop's Gospel
, in 2010. Her most recent book of poetry, The Wilderness, New & Selected Poems'', is forthcoming from
Red Hen Press in 2018. == List of publications ==