“I often find that the only way I can truly know a part of myself is when I see it as words on the page. My goal in writing is to educate myself about myself. I don’t see that as a selfish act, rather I see it as my responsibility.”
Maria is a writer, workshop leader and coach who facilitates The Butterfly Series, a writing and creative arts workshop for women who want to explore what’s next in their life journey. She also offers storytelling workshops to help people write and perform their stories in a fun, supportive and engaging format.
In 2016, her creative non-fiction piece “Family Recipes” won First Place in the Intergeneration Story Contest. Her essay What Matters was selected for the 2016 San Francisco production of Listen to Your Mother and her essay Meet Me By the River will appear in All The Women in My Family Sing, the forthcoming anthology edited by Deborah Santana. Maria’s poetry has appeared in the Apogee Journal of Colombia University and in Entropy magazine. Her flash fiction has appeared in the on-line journal A Quiet Courage.
Since 2014, she’s co-hosted Women’s Salons – gatherings showcasing women of color artists who share their work in film, writing, theater and music. She is also a guest blogger with Latinxs in Kid Lit.
She is finalizing her debut novel, Rosie’s Blues a story inspired by the experience of her mother opening their family home in Hackensack, New Jersey as a shelter for battered women and children and is working on her next book, Jobs: Life Lessons through Paystubs. She is a member of Write on Mamas, a San Francisco Bay Area-based writers group.