Mentee Maya Collins Releases New Poetry Chapbook

Congratulations to mentee Maya Collins, who has released their second chapbook of poetry from Bottlecap Press, [Waiting Room].

At Girls Write Now, Maya has contributed to the 2023 and 2024 Girls Write Now anthologies as well as the zine A Fistful of Verse. They have participated in the Lead Community Change and Poetry 360 Journeys, and they have been featured as a guest on Writing Our Way to Wellness.

Maya’s latest chapbook is inspired by the work of Louise Gluck, and is infused with the richness of Greek mythology to explore ideas around hospitals and waiting.

From Bottlecap Press:

“The reader is invited to enter this chapbook as one enters a hospital waiting room. This is that in-between space: the home we did not plan on, the place that no one prepared for us. It is a refugee encampment, it is the shade on the side of a road, it is a “bedroom” in a psych ward. This collection does not offer an escape—you will not hear your name called by a nurse, there will be no healing nor help in some proceeding room. Instead, each poem will investigate the nature of the waiting room itself. There is a beauty in the thing we wait for, the thing we dream of. But there is also a beauty in that brave and terrifying act of hoping for something more. Being broken, and uncertain if the mending will ever come. Not knowing, yet continuing to hold on. To dream, even.”