Journalism

I'm a full-time critic at large at the New York Times. I write about theater, movies, television and nerd culture. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, The Week, Vulture, Polygon, American Theatre, American Poets, Mashable and The New York Amsterdam News, among many others. I was the inaugural New York Times arts critic fellow and the 2020-2021 recipient of Cornell University’s George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

You can check out a sampling of my work below.

NERD

Order NERD: Amazon | Indiebound | Bookshop

Also available as an audiobook, narrated by yours truly.

My first book of criticism, NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse, was published in 2022 by Atria Books.

Spanning from the 90s through to today, Nerd is a collection of cultural criticism essays through the lens of fandom for everyone from the casual Marvel movie watcher to the hardcore Star Wars expanded universe connoisseur. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered where they fit into the narrative or if they can be seen as a hero—even of their own story.

Praise for NERD:

“Maya Phillips’s breezy, personal, engaging first book of prose is not a study of nerds, nor a look at their history. Instead, it’s a look at what millennial nerds read and watch, which together create what we call nerd culture. … Each essay, like a longsword, has both an edge and a point.”

—Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review

“Maya Phillips has done the impossible: She has rescued fandom from the toxic grip of trolling dude-bros and reclaimed it for the rest of us, reminding readers why we become fans in the first place. A personal Pilgrim’s Progress of one nerd’s journey from Hoth to Mordor, Wakanda to Sunnydale, the Island of Long to a mystical land named ‘Manhattan’ (via a fluid prose that inspires its own swooning acolytes), Phillips’s superhero origin story shows us an alternate universe in which fantasy lit, comic books, and anime do not stunt one’s personal growth and adult perspectives—they enable them. It’s worth its weight in mecha suits.”

– David Fear, senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine

“From its very first pages, NERD is a delight. Equal parts autobiography and history of the way these genres and fandoms—and fandom itself—has grown, this collection of essays provides an impressive look at the larger cultural context in which these movies, TV shows, and comics exist. In the same way that the fandoms Phillips addresses often provide community and a sense of connection, the experience of reading NERD feels like making a new friend.”

– Karen Han, culture critic, screenwriter, and author of Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema

“Like the heroes’ journeys that inspired her, Maya’s odyssey into fandom will resonate with anyone who ever camped out in the graphic novels section. Maya is a kindred spirit and Nerd a handy guide for fans of everything, everywhere.”

– Daniel Kibblesmith, author and Emmy-nominated TV writer

“With humor and exacting criticism, Phillips serves up food for thought—a whole meal, really—for anyone who’s ever struggled to see themselves as the hero.”

– BookPage (“2022 Preview: Most Anticipated Nonfiction”)

“These sparkling essays demolish the boundaries between high and low art.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Hardcore fans will enjoy the analysis while new viewers will find a wealth of ideas.”

– Library Journal

Erou

Order Erou: Amazon | Indiebound | Four Way Books

Winner: 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize
Winner: 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award
Finalist: PEN Open Book Award
Pronounced EH-rew

Praise for Erou

“These spare poems quiver with grief, but they are no mere elegies. No, they are exorcisms for the father’s infidelities and outbursts, they are conjurings of his ghost as it wanders the subways and bears witness to his own autopsy. Here, you have the strange finesse of Anne Carson but hammered by the hard knocks of the city and our modern times.”
—Nickole Brown

“These engrossing poems bind family and myth, intimacy and allegory, 'Gap-toothed Erou' and 'Erou of the forked tongue.' The poetry of Maya Phillips is full of unforgettable imagery, wordplay and candor. She writes with a clarity that can cut as quickly as it calms.”
—Terrance Hayes

“The hero’s journey has never been more engaging in contemporary poetry than in Erou by Maya Phillips. We travel between the mythical and the hyper-real, making sense of a world that’s becoming stranger than fiction daily; she captures how our lives appear to us and gives permission to question why our days feel like a fable. Phillips navigates between the struggles of family and the complications of love and the quotidian challenges we must navigate in the world. With the keen eye of Robert Hayden and the lyric range of June Jordan, Maya Phillips has stepped forward with a collection of poems that’s an odyssey for the 21st century.”
—A. Van Jordan

“Executed as a modern epic poem that blends urban decadence with transcendental pathos, Phillips eviscerates the idea of pedestrian exchanges. This impressive work invites a discourse that redefines the depths of desperation, forgiveness, and acceptance.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“The difficult, perhaps selfish, repeatedly mourned dead father in ‘Erou’ competes with and sometimes merges into Phillips’s scenes from Greek mythology (‘Hades, Hosting’; ‘Persephone, Rising’), whose stark tableaus can echo those of Louise Glück. In plain language with plenty of white space, the poems try to get beyond detail, beyond history, yet they ground themselves first and last in the father’s life and times.”
—Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review

More about Erou

In Search of a Black Odysseus: My Father’s Journey Home

Absence, Presence: An Interview with Maya Phillips

Brooklyn Poets’ Poet of the Week

Poetry

My debut full-length poetry collection, Erou (pronounced EH-rew), was published by Four Way Books in 2019. It was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize and 2020 Poetry by the Sea book award. You can order the collection and read some of my published poems at the publications listed below.

2022

“Before Notre Dame Burned, We Went on Vacation” | The New Yorker

2021

Carrie Mae Weems Series | Gagosian Quarterly

“Equinox” | Blue Bottle Coffee x Poetry Society of America: Commissioned for Spring Poetry Collection

2020

“Rauschenberg” | The New Yorker
“Theory of the Disappeared Man,” “Trick of Light” | The Baffler

2019

“Alecto” | The Missouri Review
“Augury,” “Circe,” “January 3, 2015,” “Nepenthe” | The Rumpus
“Ode to My Father’s Failed Heart” | The New York Times Magazine
“Haunt,” “In Consideration of Love” | wildness

2018

"Poem Ending with a Scene of a Woman Alone" | American Literary Review
"The Woman," "Sometimes my father is a roaming hunger," "In Which My Mother and Father Meet for Brunch After His Death," "And/Or," "Of Late" | West Branch
"At the Doctor's Office" | The Boiler
"Revision," "Losing His Cool" | The Gettysburg Review
"Offering" | Vinyl
"Persephone, Engaged" | At Length
"Erou" | Hayden's Ferry Review
"A Kind of Temperament" | BOAAT
"Daddy says," "Say," "Ode to My Father's Failed Kidney," "Currency," "My father dreams of the sky" | Ghost Proposal

 2017

"The Kindly Ones," "Theme in Red" | Anomaly

 2016

"Sunnydale High Student No. 23" | FreezeRay Poetry

About

Maya Phillips was born and raised in New York. Maya received her BFA in writing, literature, and publishing with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College and her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, At Length, The Baffler, BOAAT, Ghost Proposal, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Vinyl, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her arts & entertainment journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, Mashable, Slate, The Week, American Theatre, and more.

She is the author of NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022) and the poetry collection Erou (Four Way Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize and 2020 Poetry by the Sea book award. She is the recipient of a Hodder Grant from Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Maya was the inaugural arts critic fellow at The New York Times and is now a full-time critic at the Times, where she writes about theater, movies, TV, books, and nerd culture. She lives in Brooklyn.

Agent: Julia Eagleton @ Janklow & Nesbit

Read more about her poetry and journalism and follow her @mayabphillips or sign up for her newsletter below.