Maya Alexandri

Author of
The Plague Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)
The Celebration Husband (TSL Publications 2015)

Maya Alexandri is the author of The Plague Cycle, a short story collection, and The Celebration Husband, a novel. Her short stories have been published in The Stockholm Review of Books, The Light Ekphrastic, Adelaide, Dime Show Review, and many others. Her story, “Ann Noni Mini,” was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She was one of the organizers of, and performers in, the 2016-2017 Amplified Cactus inter-disciplinary arts series in Baltimore, Maryland. She counts among her literary mentors the novelist and poet D.M. Thomas and the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Maya has lived in China, India, and Kenya, and she has worked as an actor, lawyer, UN consultant, blues-rock singer, and emergency medical technician. She is currently a resident physician in Emergency Medicine at Augusta University Medical Center and a Captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

Twitter / Facebook / MayaAlexandri.com / Represented by Madison Smartt Bell

The Plague Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)

For much of recorded history, travelers on the Nile considered the vast swampland called the Sudd to be an impassable barrier (al-sadd, from which “Sudd” derives, is akin to “obstacle” in Arabic). The Sudd frustrated countless attempts to locate the source of the Nile. The Plague Cycle recounts an outbreak of Ebola virus within the ambit of the Sudd. Its narrator is a local staff member of an international NGO who digs graves at a quarantine camp. Acquainted with several tribal languages, as well as Arabic and Swahili, the narrator relates all in a version of “global English”. —Globish

Praise

“In an unnamed country in Africa, a plague is stalking the population. Medical workers, trying to survive themselves, work ceaselessly to help and console stricken villagers, when into their midst comes a benign mysterious near savior, with wings. Implicitly and without fanfare, these beautifully constructed stories—profound, humane, dark, and yet illuminated by love and belief in humanity—bring us into the heart of the global catastrophes facing our species and our planet today. They grapple with pain and loss, but they also shimmer with miracle.” —Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier and Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti

”Maya Alexandri writes with the beauty and magic of a different era. The haunting, moving stories in The Plague Cycle are like modern day fairy tales. Alexandri’s prose lights up the reader’s imagination, illuminating a vivid landscape you will never forget.” —Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Trouble with Lexie and The Wonderbread Summer

”Maya Alexandri's cycle of linked short stories offers a stark and poetic vision of a worldwide epidemic, as experienced through the lives of aid-workers in a small African camp. As these very human heroes struggle to deal with the complex effects of the devastating plague, readers are privy to to an unflinching depiction of the ravages of disease—both physical and psychological, individual and collective—in a voice that moves between clinical and mythological, personal and societal, in a stunning, fast-paced work that leaves behind a residue of both despair and plain, human hope. This is the kind of meaningful fiction that lingers with you long after the first time you read it.” —Timmy Reed, author of Kill Me Now, IRL, and Miraculous Fauna

The Celebration Husband (TSL Publications 2015)

On the wildest front of World War 1, Baroness Tanya von Brantburg is running intelligence missions for the British irregular forces in East Africa, with whom her husband is enlisted. Risking enemy fire, attacks by lions, temptations to double-cross,and seduction by an old flame, she confronts in this crucible the ultimate challenges to her integrity and her love.