Maya J. Sorini
Maya J. Sorini is an award-winning poet and medical student from Rockville, Maryland. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis while engaging in clinical trauma surgery research. After finishing her undergraduate degree, Maya pursued a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where she went on to teach students the intricacies of designing and facilitating narrative medicine workshops. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Medicine at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and lives in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Winner of the 2023 Press 53 Award for Poetry
A Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection
ISBN: 978-1-950413-60-7
9 x 6 softcover, 74 pages
Praise for The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den
The poems in Maya J. Sorini’s The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den take us inside the intense and often gruesome world of a hospital trauma unit, a milieu both surreal and (often) deadly real. Sorini never looks away from the hard stuff—in fact, the hard stuff is where she starts—but her gorgeous, precise lines and rhythms make this book unputdownable, despite the human instinct to look away. I finished this book grateful and changed.
—Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik and Landscape with Sex and Violence
Maya Sorini’s verse travels to the frontier of life and death, staring down the sublime, probing the capacity of language. As a witness grappling with the grave responsibilities of the clinician, her poems are beautiful—alternatingly lyrical and blunt—challenging the reader to walk beside her.
—Danielle Spencer, PhD, Director, Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University
The Boneheap in the Lion’s Den takes the reader to that intersection where life meets death, pain meets relief, and hope meets fear. Only a few of us live there and we do what we do so that you will hopefully be able to live as you do. Welcome to our world.
—Thomas M. Scalea, MD, Physician in Chief, Shock Trauma Center, University of Maryland Medical Center