Poetic Justice
Coming Soon…
“Writing has always been the way I process and understand the world,” says Maw Shein Win, a Burmese American poet, teacher, and literary organizer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this wide-ranging conversation, she reflects on her creative path, the thematic threads that weave through her poetry, the ways her Burmese heritage informs both her life and her art, and her commitment to using poetry as a means of witness and connection.
At the outset, she reads “Spirit House Six,” the final poem from her latest collection. The piece vividly conjures movement, ritual, and the spiritual realm, setting a tone for the conversation. She explains that her parents emigrated from Myanmar in the early 1960s, her father arriving first to the United States for medical residency and her mother following soon after. She was born in Massachusetts, the first of her siblings born in the U.S., and spent her childhood moving frequently—from Massachusetts to New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada, and Southern California—before settling in the Bay Area.
Her earliest relationship with poetry began in childhood. Although her parents appreciated literature— her mother read Emily Dickinson during her own university years— they pursued careers in medicine rather than the arts. Maw Shein Win kept journals from a young age, filling them with observations and fragments. In fifth grade, she shared one of her pieces with a teacher, who told her, “You’re going to be a poet. Well, you already are a poet!” That validation, she says, “was the first time anyone said that to me,” and it gave her a new sense of identity.
When Maw Shein Win began college, she declared a journalism major but soon realized poetry was her true calling. She transferred to a school with a stronger poetry program. At the same time, she immersed herself in the punk and experimental music scene of early 1980s Los Angeles, playing in a band with close friends, making zines, and performing across disciplines. “There was this openness to what we did,” she recalls, describing a collaborative atmosphere in which poetry, music, performance art, and visual art blended freely. Describing herself as a “cross-pollinator” who thrives on artistic exchanges that push her into new aesthetic territory, her frequent collaborations with painters, photographers and other poets began during those early days in LA.
A small grant funded her first full-length manuscript, Tales of a Lonely Meat Eater. Later came Ruins of a Glittering Palace, a collaborative chapbook with artist Mark Dutcher that emerged from an exchange of poems and paintings. Score and Bone is another short collection written during what she jokingly calls her “double hip residency,” a six-month recovery from surgery in which friends visited to write together. Maw Shein Win has also had two full length collections published—Storage Unit for the Spirit House (2020) and Invisible Gifts: Poems (2018). A third collection, Percussing the Thinking Jar, since been published.
The poems that coalesced into Storage Unit for the Spirit House had an unusual genesis. The germ of an idea arose during a year of transition, when she was moving out of her home in Berkeley; she gave away most of her possessions, and stored the rest— including books, records, instruments, and art—in two storage units. Spending time in those confined spaces prompted her to reflect on the symbolism of storage units, the objects people keep, and the idea of containers. At the same time, she found herself looking into “spirit houses,” small shrines for offerings to local deities (nats) that she knew about from Myanmar and Thailand. As she learned more about them, she began writing “spirit house” poems and recognized they could anchor her book, merging with the ideas connected to storage spaces. Thematically, the collection explores “containment” in many forms— architectural spaces, natural enclosures, and the poem itself as a container— as well as family, memory, and the spirit world. But this notion of containers runs through many of her creations. “Each of my books has been about a different kind of container,” she says, like the body, memory, or even physical spaces. “The idea of holding space— whether for objects, memories, or spirits— felt like a way to talk about impermanence and preservation at once.”
Other themes she explores through her poems are the body, illness, and healing, as in Scorned Bone. In Invisible Gifts, she structured the book around color, naming sections “Hang on Bluebells,” “Pink Light,” “Silvery Moth,” and “The Greenhouse” after noticing how often color appeared in her poems. Her current manuscript engages with the concept of lists and long-form poems that catalogue moments in time—what occurs in a room, a body, or a day—an approach she began exploring during the pandemic.
Her creative process combines using multiple notebooks—some for raw fragments, others for more developed drafts—to capture images, phrases, or impressions whenever they occur, and oral readings because she finds that hearing her poems read aloud helps her gauge their pacing, rhythm, and emotional impact. Finally, collaboration plays a central role in her work. Besides her collaboration with artists from other genres as described above, she participates in writing groups, shares drafts with trusted peers, and remains open to feedback. Maw Shein Win mentors emerging poets, curates reading series, and fosters networks that support writers from underrepresented backgrounds.
She talks about her literary influences as wide-ranging, from the experimental typography of e.e. Cummings, to the lyric precision of Tracy K. Smith, to the thematic boldness of Victoria Chang. Maw Shein Win gravitates toward work that surprises, unsettles, and rewards repeated reading. Her own style— spare yet resonant, imagistic yet grounded— reflects this sensibility. She reads widely across styles and values poetry that surprises, takes risks, and draws her back for repeated readings. A “good” poem, for her, is one she wants to revisit, that offers fresh imagery, musicality, and sonic richness.
Deeply connected to her Burmese heritage, Maw Shein Win has integrated it as an important dimension of her artistic life. She has collaborated with other Burmese writers such as Kenneth Wong and ko ko thett on events and anthologies that bring attention to Myanmar’s political crisis, and raise money to support causes there. She says it is apt to do it through poetry, because Myanmar has a rich literary tradition, and poetry has been a tool of witness and resistance; many pro-democracy poets have been jailed or killed. She stresses the importance of keeping the country’s struggles visible, given the decline in international media coverage. “Even if a reader has never been to Myanmar or knows nothing about it, a poem can be an entry point into understanding,” she explains. It communicates lived experience, fosters empathy, and connects people across distances and cultures.
She advises emerging poets to “find your communities,” stressing the plural. no single group can sustain or nourish a poet completely. Different circles— academic, artistic, activist, cultural, spiritual, or local— offer distinct forms of support and challenge. She tells new poets to not be afraid to share work publicly or even self-publish. Collaboration, she stresses, can make the creative leap less daunting, and mentorship, when available, is “like gold.”
Near the close of the conversation, she reads “Factory,” a poem from Storage Unit for the Spirit House. Its imagery moves from “sepia timecards” and “combination locks” to a “scorpion in the break room,” compressing a world into a few vivid lines. She then rereads “Spirit House Six,” feeling it is the right note on which to end— some nats retreating into a teak trunk, a final act of containment.
Throughout the interview, she returns to the idea of poetry as a bridge— between cultures, between art forms, between individuals. Her own life embodies these crossings: Burmese and American, visual and verbal, solitary and collaborative. She speaks about the necessity of art in turbulent times, not as an escape but as a means of deeper engagement.
Looking ahead, Maw Shein Win hopes to continue exploring new forms and collaborations while remaining anchored in the themes that have long preoccupied her: memory, impermanence, and connection. She envisions her work reaching audiences who might not otherwise encounter poetry, whether through gallery shows, public installations, or community events. “I want the poems to keep opening doors,” she says, “for me, for readers, and for the stories that still need to be told.”
Please note the following interview took place in 2022, and Maw Shein Win’s profile photograph is courtesy of Annabelle Port. In 2025, Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. You can learn more about her at mawsheinwin.com. Her mother Ayya Gunasari is the founding abbess of Mahapajapati Monastery: https://mahapajapatifoundation.org/ayya-gunasari/. Finally, Kenneth Wong has translated two poems for Percussing the Thinking Jar that can be found here: https://aaww.org/two-poems-by-maw-shein-win-translated-by-kenneth-wong/