Maw Shein Win

Maw Shein Win served as the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California from 2016 to 2018. Her works include the full-length poetry collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024) which was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee and a 2025 Recipient of the Nomadic/San Francisco Foundation Literary Award. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press, 2018), and two chapbooks, Score and Bone (Black Lawrence Press/Nomadic Press, 2016) and Ruins of a glittering palace (2013). Along with Adrian de la Peña, she is co-publisher of Literary Cherry, a collaborative project and editor of the Process Note Series.

• Inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2018-2020)

• CSU Long Beach, BA in English, Concentration in Creative Writing

• Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, 2025
• Recipient of the Nomadic/San Francisco Foundation Literary Award for Creative Non-fiction, 2025
• 100 Honoree, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2023
• Arts Research Center Community Poetry Fellow at University of California, Berkeley, 2021
   

• Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024)
• Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020)
• Invisible Gifts, Poems (Manic D Press, 2018)
• Score and Bone (Nomadic Press, 2016)
• Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth)