Maurya Simon's The Blue Bridge, is her twelfth volume of poems. La Sirena: A Novella in Verse (2024), an earlier volume, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Simon's collection, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers Association's Gold Medal in Poetry. Simon's opera, ?Tamar,? based on her verse libretto, with music composed by French American composer, Eliane Aberdam, premiered at the University of Rhode Island. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellow (South India), NEA Poetry Fellow, and a Poetry Society's Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awardee, she's served residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Visby, Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Edinburgh, Scotland), the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Santa Cruz, CA), and at the MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH). Simon's poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Bengali, Greek, and Farsi. She serves as a Professor Emerita in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.