About

Maya grew up in Bloomington, Indiana and some in Jerusalem, Israel, where her family is from. The rest of her family has moved back to Israel. Stories both of migration and of Jerusalem have shaped her family history for many generations, having had grandparents and ancestors born in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Palestine, Argentina, and Germany. As a Jerusalemite, her poetry and other writing often sits at the intersection of the personal, political, and spiritual. She has worked with refugees, immigrants, inmates and detainees, and young children in New Jersey and in Tel Aviv and Jaffa in Israel. She speaks Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic and has spent substantial time in Spain and in southern India. In 2015, she walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain which also has influenced her poetry. She also sings and plays guitar, and enjoys salsa dancing, swimming, solving crosswords and painting for fun with her husband, and long walks. She is an avid dog sitter, and in August 2020 she adopted her foster dog Benny. (Follow him on instagram! @benny.bendito).

Maya Wahrman, LSW, MSW, is a licensed social worker in New Jersey. She is the Training Officer for Client-Centered Services at Switchboard, a one-stop resource hub for refugee service providers in the United States, and a project of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Previously, Maya was the Refugee Health and Wellness Specialist in the New Jersey Office of New Americans (NJ ONA) in the Department of Human Services. Before that she served as the Director of Case Management and Refugee School Impact Coordinator at Interfaith-RISE refugee resettlement agency in Highland Park, NJ. She graduated with her Masters of Social Work (MSW) from the Rutgers University Intensive Weekend Masters in Social Work program, serving her field practicum by providing Telehealth counseling at Church Based Mental Health Services for her field certification. She served as a 2020-2021 Eagleton Graduate Fellow conducting her spring governmental internship at the NJONA. She graduated summa cum laude in 2016 from the History Department at Princeton University with certificates in Near Eastern Studies and Creative Writing. Maya has worked in Trenton, NJ as a Bilingual Case Manager at the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF), serving at Hedgepeth/Williams Middle School and as a client advocate from the main LALDEF office. Two years prior she worked as the Program Assistant in Forced Migration at the Office of Religious Life at Princeton University, where she co-curated their conference, Seeking Refuge: Faith-Based Approaches to Forced Migration, as well as an interfaith policy forum about the role of religion in domestic refugee resettlement.

Maya’s senior thesis at Princeton, “Minorities in Mosul: The Workings of the 1925 League of Nations Enquiry Commission,” investigated the creation of the border between Iraq and Turkey in 1925 and the presence of the British mandate in Iraq, the development of how religious and ethnic groups became minorities under the new nationalist Arab state of Iraq, and the effects of global governance and self-determination after World War One. This intellectual interest and research grew in tandem with a growing concern and investment in the refugee crises of the Middle East, past and present. In 2017 Maya was involved with a global history teaching initiative with Syrian refugee learners living in Camp Azraq in Jordan.