Maria S. Picone

Maria S. Picone—수영—(she/her/hers) writes, paints, and teaches from her home in Charleston. Her debut poetry chapbook, Adoptee Song, will be published in 2024 by Game Over Books, with another chapbook, Anti Asian Bias, to come in 2025. Her debut fiction chapbook, This Tenuous Atmosphere, was released by Conium Press in 2024. Maria is the recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission, for which she published a hybrid chapbook, Korean Girl Ghost, which centers on her adulthood return to South Korea as an adoptee, and an Individual Artist Opportunity Grant from South Arts.

Maria’s work explores themes of queer and BIPOC identity, pop culture, social justice, and ecology. Her writing has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Porter House Review, Vestal Review, and Orca Lit, among others. She is the winner of the Cream City Review Summer 2020 Poetry Prize and the Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander. Maria was published in Best Small Fictions 2021. She is also a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and three-time Best of the Net nominee.

Her work has been supported by scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, The Speakeasy Project, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, GrubStreet, AWP, Voices of Our Nations Arts, Murphy Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, The HUES Foundation, The Watering Hole, South Carolina Writers Association, Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Juniper Institute, SFWA, South Arts, South Carolina Arts Commission, and The Loft. She has attended residencies at Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto, Starry Night Retreat in New Mexico, House of Two Urns Retreat in Chicago and The Hambidge Center in Georgia, for which she won a Distinguished Fellowship for Leadership in the Arts.

She is the managing editor at Chestnut Review and Five Minutes, poetry editor at Hanok Review, associate editor at Uncharted Mag, managing fiction editor at Foglifter, and assistant poetry editor at The Seventh Wave. Additionally, she has edited and/or read for a host of other journals. She is an associate member of SFWA and a member of several other writing organizations including SFPA, Lighthouse Writers, and GrubStreet.

As an artist, Maria often paints abstract, space- and nature-inspired themes with dark, dramatic colors and embedded gemstones. Her photography captures features of the world such as architecture, landscapes, patterns and designs. She works in traditional Korean brush painting and creates multimedia hybrids combining visual and textual components. Her artwork can be found in the New England Review, Déraciné Magazine, and Blue Mesa Review, among others.

She received an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and holds degrees from Princeton, Rice, and Western New Mexico University. In 2014, she won the Spirit of Goddard Scholarship in honor of her volunteer work teaching creative writing to schoolchildren in Cambodia. She is an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Generator program and is working on her first novel. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, and reads French, Latin, and ancient Greek. You can read her work on her website, mariaspicone.com or find her on Twitter @mspicone.